What's up with the work orders?

I've been dealing with work orders from the maintenance side for many years now but I still don't understand their purpose. Of course, they are a record of the complaint and perhaps a record of permission to enter, but what do you do with them after they are completed? When I was working as manager and maintenance on three properties I just hung a sign in the halls that said "Need Maintenance? Call 555-XXXX" and everyone was happy with that on the tenant side. I filled out a log at the end of the day and sent it to the supervisor. End of story. So, what's up with the work orders? It's faster and more efficient to take the office out of the loop. Yes? No? What are your thoughts? What am I missing?

Perry! Great question. It's so good to ask WHY with practices we've done 4-evuh!
The paper itself is not of great value, and the office team doesn't always translate the work correctly. So WHY?
There are a couple of valid reasons in my book:
- If you're on a property that receives, say, an average of 10 work orders a day, like one of ours, and you spend 2-5 minutes per call to report the work orders, you would lose 30 -50 minutes ever work day just taking calls. That doesn't account for time to organize the workflow.
- If you miss a call, you may not get the opportunity to fix it. More and more people don't leave a VM. They may call 2 or 3 times without leaving a message and then won't call back at all. If you're fixing the major leak or electrical gizmo, you can't drop everything and take the call. The percent opportunity of calls being answered by the office team is probably higher than someone with his hands at work!
- Even if you can manage the calls without a lot of phone time, the interruption to your day, to whatever you may be doing, then starting it back, is a big time drain.
- Most important to me is watching the overall time required to complete work orders, adequate staffing to accomplish the number of work orders, what type of work orders a property is experiencing and what do those trends mean, stats that are easier to obtain when the office is helping record the data rather than you catching it up on your log at the end of the day.

Even better, if you use an automated system, say on your smart phone or tablet, and residents can report non-emergencies on the portal, then it helps meet everyone's goals of the work orders going directly to the maintenance team, and maintenance accurately reporting the time and materials it took. I have used ResMan, which has a mobile maintenance app and resident portal, and PropertyMeld.com, which streamlines the reporting, scheduling, resident surveys, and more. Both have excellent tracking of metrics that help you make better budgeting, staffing,and customer service decisions.

Thoughts?

Wonderful response Mary. Just the sort I was hoping for but it does raise a few more questions. Such as:
What does it mean to "Organize workflow?"
Why is the completion time important? All repairs are unique. I can't see that being a useful statistic.

For example: It takes maintenance person A 10 minutes to change a leaking wax ring on Monday and tech B 30 minutes on Tuesday. You would think that B is dogging the process but no one accounted for how big the bathroom was. Perhaps the flange is just slightly too off of level and he/she had to go back to the shop for a double stuff ring (it happens.) In that case 30 minutes means the tech was flying.

For our properties, it is important to manage work orders because it helps provide needed documentation as to what the properties' problem areas are, how much we expended per repair, and helps get your budgets on track, or at least provide an explanation as to why you off budget in certain areas. These work orders help identify and prioritize the service requests. It keeps things balanced, in other words. The system is valuable when it comes to recording any call backs from residents for the same issue. Finally, it allows the Office team to connect and follow up with both their Maintenance Techs and the residents to ensure great customer service is provided.

Mindy: Thank you so much for your reply. I'm really getting an insight into large scale management which is exactly what I wanted. It was all a matter of asking the right question. Okay, I'm trying not to sound sarcastic here but those must be some good work orders you have. The ones I have used have some vague direction such as "Sometimes there is water on my kitchen floor" as reported by the tenant and the tech has to figure it out from there. Once it's fixed, the tech initials the form perhaps with some notes and the office files it. That's it as far as I know. I always supposed that they gathered the rest of the information by the purchase orders we put in for parts with the supplier. The "Sometimes there is water on the floor." Could be anything from trivial (the dog was playing with the ice maker in the refrigerator door) to catastrophic (all the DWV pipe is rotting out) and that would not be indicated anywhere on a work order such as I have used.

You're right - inputting the detailed information on the work order is key. I bet that is the number one complaint most Maintenance Techs report, too. Property Managers to the Maintenance Supervisors to the answering service, etc. all should be properly instructed as to what information a Tech will need to perform the work. All service requests will include a phone number as well, so that a Tech can actually call the resident if indeed the language is vague. I teach our Techs if they do not understand the work order to contact the person who took the original complaint, followed by the resident. When a tech decides to proceed and isn't sure exactly what is wrong (largely because the customer actually doesn't really know either) then when he returns the completed service request, he records what he did, etc. and that information is input into the system. At a weekly/daily team meeting, this Work Order is used for further education to all involved. In fact, for a WO about "sometimes there is water on the floor" if it is indeed due to resident error (such as their dog) we inform the resident (in addition to leaving the Tech Note) separately to make sure he understands what happened. The resident should know this a collaborative process.

Whoa! Mindy. You wrote: "I bet that is the number one complaint most Maintenance Techs report, too."

No, that is not the number one complaint. People who have no understanding of apartment buildings (tenants) call other people who have no understanding of apartment buildings (office workers) and describe vaguely that there is a problem… that's just the nature of the beast. Without changing the system completely there is no cure for this. The maintenance person just has to get used to the fact that he/she is working for people who don't know with any precision what he/she does. It's both boon and bane for the maintenance person. If you are a bad maintenance person and don't know a coping saw form an easy-out, it's great because you won't get fired. You can take a nap in the middle of a turn, talk on the phone, surf the web for porn, and your "Supervisor" thinks that you deserve a promotion because you show up every day and you've been there for five years. You must be doing the job well. From the competent maintenance person's perspective, it's much the same as toting around a bag of rocks. The office workers are just something pointless that gets in the way of fixing whatever it is. That is the number one complaint of the competent folks, the Bozos think everything is fine. That IS the number one complaint, but I wouldn't admit it if I was working for you.

Now back to our regularly scheduled program…. How can we make the work order process better? What does the office need to know and how can it be effectively transmitted?

LOVE your perspective, Perry! You are too funny! And Mindy, you are too smart!

Sorry to jump in late, but wanted to answer your "Maintenance Work Flow" question. As you know (better than I) you can't just complete work orders in the order people called. Someone has to to organize them by priority/urgency (not the resident's urgency, but the actual potential for damage!) If the Maintenance Tech has to stop everytime a service request comes in and shuffle his work load, it's one more drain on his/her time.

As for the importance of logging time, you are so right about different techs needing different time to complete the same task, whether or not they are "dogging it." Even a NOT-dogging-it Tech may not be as skilled as another on a particular kind of problem, or can run into other problems, or see something else that needs to be taken care of in the same apartment, or the resident is home and wants it explained to them, or the tech didn't have a needed part, or blah blah blah. So it's not to rate the tech, or berate the tech either. It's to have a concept of how much we have to do on a property, vs. how much one person CAN do, and plan accordingly. We discovered, for example, that no matter how we try, residents are going to "save" their work order needs for the first of the month when they pay rent. So we purposely don't let any leases expire at the end of the month, hoping the maintenance team isn't saddled with BOTH a ton of work orders AND a ton of turns and renewal work orders. That helps our workflow, and we continually look for other ways to help make life easier and work more efficient for our team!

This is a lot of words to say, but we look at all things with the goal of making the word order process better!

Did working toward that goal include not using work-orders at all? If so, what was the result? Which goes back to my original question on this thread. Paraphrasing a marketing book I read recently, "In business, you won't understand if you need something until you try doing without it." That made sense to me, but I'm not in business.

Love the contrarian thoughts, Perry.
We would prefer a paperless work order system, where office teams enter the info in ResMan (rather than onto a post-it note and THEN enter it), and the Technician reports completion through the app, and it sends a survey automatically to the resident. We have the capability but we are still using paper...
Good discussion! Thanks for starting it!

No, actually I was suggesting taking the office out of the loop altogether. Most apartment repairs involve little or no expense, a bit of Teflon tape, a longer screw, putting a hanging door back on track, that sort of thing. What's the advantage of involving the office for something like that? If an apartment needs a new water heater or any other major repair, the request could be escalated to the office once diagnosed. Less paperwork, better customer service, I can't tell you how many times a tenant has flagged me down while I was picking up the grounds and said
"Hey, can you fix this?"
And I said "No, you'll have to put in a work order."
"Why?" askes the tenant.
"I don't know." Says I... and I feel like a class 'A' fool for saying it.

Loving this topic!!!

I'm nodding my head with every comment. In my past, worked on properties and handled service requests in a variety of fashions. From no S.R. documentation to being required to write an encyclopedia for each need and repair. In my opinion the service request is best handled when everyone on the community understands the purpose, and makes use of the information that is <potentially> available.

Think about it like a Hospital's patient records. That patient record serves multiple functions:

-A patient history (keeping track of issues both relevant and not relevant to the current illness)
-It is a record of both test results and what was done in the past (in case further diagnosis is needed)
-Permission to continue or discontinue treatment (for legal cause)
-Record of supplies used (for both accounting and inventory purposes)
-Staffing needs (ability to look back after a large scale emergency and anticipate better response)
-Training needs (if one particular illness is not being cured as quickly as other hospitals report)
-Preventative measures (record of vitamins or other healthy measures to prevent illness)
-Document of time (how many personnel are involved in this patients care for consult if needed)
-Identify and diagnose trends (does the hospital need to increase vaccination efforts?)

While this analogy may be a little heavy handed, service requests are needed by more than just the staff performing the repairs. Yes, the current process is at times as inefficient as the hospital insurance adjuster taking a diagnostic history from a patient to tell the brain surgeon where to cut. At the same time; we need the insurance adjuster involved to ensure all the documentation is correct or else the hospital is in legal trouble.

The on-site staff is experiencing a high amount of change. I actually spoke with an Exec recently that was investigating ways of removing office personnel from properties because of how much can be done "on the cloud". He stated that with this goal in mind, his maintenance staff would carry even more of the load of company identity and customer satisfaction than what they currently do.

I think that one day, there will be a more direct line between the resident and technician, as you propose Perry; Because of all of the challenges (both in the office and in maintenance dept) I don't think we are there quite yet.