Boosting Your Bottom Line: How Work Order Management Software Reduces Costs

Whether small or big, if you’re running an enterprise that relies on physical assets, chances are you perform maintenance daily. Service events are routine, as they help to avoid asset failure, but what many organizations forget is the hidden expenses associated with inefficient maintenance. Poor management of work orders is the root cause.

Imagine this: your managers spend hours tracking work orders on paper, or a technician visits the maintenance site, only to see that their required inventory isn’t available. They may look like small bottlenecks, but they accumulate rapidly, drain resources, inflate costs, and ultimately hurt your bottom line. If you haven’t already, it’s time to consider work order management software.

What is Work Order Management Software

Solving maintenance inefficiencies isn’t just about working harder. Rather, it’s all about leveraging automation and data intelligence to work smarter, and that’s where Work Order Management (WOM) systems come into play. 

WOM software digitizes your entire maintenance lifecycle, including inventory management and regular operations. What’s more, it gives you a centralized hub to visualize all this in one platform, where you can view and execute SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures), manage production cycles, check quality control, and schedule asset inspections proactively. Managers can track, assign, manage, and close work orders from the hub, with both desktop and mobile access, instead of frantically juggling paper records or spreadsheets, which only leads to data silos.

How It Helps

One of the most significant benefits of a robust WOM software is its ability to boost profitability. Here’s how:

1. Removing Administrative Costs for Paper-Based Processes

One of the most visible cost-saving benefits of WOM software is cutting down on paper-based, inefficient work order processes. Traditional maintenance teams use several error-prone, paper-based steps: written work order requests, verbal reports, data entries for scheduling, and manual job card filing. These bring on additional expenses related to the following:

• Duplicate Orders: Manually logging information, such as work hours, asset tags, maintenance descriptions, etc., often causes errors, resulting in duplicated work orders or, worse, maintenance work on incorrect assets.
• Staff Overhead: Employee or technician time is wasted on administrative tasks, like searching for lost work orders, data entry, manually logging reports, etc. 

By digitizing the maintenance lifecycle, WOM systems eradicate these problems and, in turn, bring down your costs. When a work order comes in, it enters the system digitally, gets routed for scheduling, completion is logged, and the required reports are automatically compiled.

2. Bundling Work Orders for Seamless Maintenance

Enterprises with multiple offices may fragment work orders across locations, particularly if high-traffic locations require frequent servicing. WOM systems can bundle location-based maintenance tasks under each work order. Meaning, fewer trips are required for maintenance, assets on the same site can be serviced together, and technician resources aren’t exhausted altogether. This cuts down on billable hours and reduces costs that can be better utilized elsewhere.

3. Reducing Reactive Maintenance Processes

Reactive maintenance is a significant financial drain for most organizations. When any asset breaks down, your team goes into firefighter mode to deal with the emergency hands-on. The result? Ongoing work orders get hampered, technicians charge for sudden call-outs, and you’ll probably end up paying more for expediting shipping of critical inventory. Let’s not forget the loss of production due to unplanned downtime, either. 

With WOM software, reactive maintenance stops being a hassle because you get the firepower to adopt predictive maintenance. Here’s how:

• Smart Scheduling: WOM systems use asset-based data (operational hours, usage frequency, and running conditions) to automatically schedule planned maintenance (PM). This reduces the chances of equipment failure and, more importantly, sudden breakdowns. 
• Process Standardization: Every PM task doesn’t just get automated, but also includes standardized checklists that both stakeholders and technicians can follow. This ensures high-quality output and eliminates guesswork, preventing early failure that often includes costly maintenance. 
• Service History: WOM systems also maintain historical records of all PM tasks. Through these, managers can view past PM, identify patterns of missed PMs or neglected work, and adjust proactively to avoid over-the-budget expenses that asset failures require.

4. Optimizing Labor Costs

Labor is always one of the largest financial drains in maintenance, especially in manual systems. From traveling back and forth to waiting for work orders and searching for asset manuals, a lot gets delayed, ultimately draining your resources. WOM systems resolve these by:

• Providing mobile order access where managers can schedule work, technicians can view and close orders, and there’s immediate access to repair manuals, PM history, inventory data, etc.
• Automatically matching work orders with technicians based on the required skills and credentials, preventing follow-up maintenance. 
• Accurately tracking time to avoid manual tracking and, more importantly, providing data on work order durations for planning budgets, labor needs, and identifying maintenance bottlenecks for future orders.

Wrapping Up

Manual maintenance operations are quickly becoming a thing of the past, and for good reason. Using intelligent tools like WOM software, enterprises can convert siloed data and manual work into cost-effective maintenance cycles. In turn, administrative complexity gets reduced, managers can strategically plan work orders, and unplanned downtime can be tackled efficiently.