A work order tracker sounds like a tool for following one job, and following one job is the least valuable thing it does: the technician already knows what they are doing. What a tracker is actually for is the aggregate, and specifically three views that a maintenance function otherwise never sees. How old the oldest open job is. Which assets keep generating the same job. Which jobs have been deferred more than once. Each of those predicts something, and none of them is visible on a board sorted by date. This page is about the three.
Age, on the oldest open job
Not the count. A board with forty open jobs where the oldest is nine days is healthy; the same board where the oldest is eleven months is not, and the count cannot tell them apart. Ageing is also the number that gets a resourcing conversation started, because it is legible to people outside maintenance.
Repeat jobs per asset
The same fault on the same machine three times is one unsolved problem wearing three work orders. A tracker that cannot group by asset hides exactly the thing a maintenance manager most needs to find, and this is the commonest gap in simple tools.
Deferred more than once
The earliest warning available. A job rescheduled twice is telling you either that the interval is wrong or that the schedule is over-committed, and both are fixable while it is still a scheduling problem rather than a breakdown.
What tracking cannot fix
A tracker does not do work. If the three views above are all bad, the answer is capacity, criticality or intervals, not a better board. On the worked example this site publishes the reactive share is 35%; moving that is a decision about how the function is run, and the tracker only makes the decision visible.
Questions people ask about work order tracker
How is a tracker different from a work order manager?
In most products, not at all; the words are used interchangeably. Where sites separate them, managing is assigning and prioritising and tracking is watching the aggregate.
Should the tracker be visible to requesters?
Usually yes. Most chasing comes from people who cannot see that their job is queued and why, and showing them is cheaper than answering them.
What is a healthy backlog age?
Falling. An absolute target imported from another site is not actionable; your own trend is.