Work order tracking: the states a job has to pass through

Work order tracking is knowing, for every job you have promised to do, what state it is in and who is holding it. Most teams that say their tracking is broken do not have a tooling problem — they have three states where they need six, and no agreed meaning for any of them. "In progress" covering everything from "assigned yesterday" to "waiting on a part since March" is the whole failure in one field.

Work order tracking: the states that carry information

• Raised — logged with enough detail to act on, not yet assigned.
• Assigned — a named person and a target date.
• In progress — someone is actually on it now.
• Blocked, with the reason typed: awaiting part, awaiting access, awaiting approval, awaiting the customer.
• Completed — work done, evidence attached, not yet checked.
• Verified and closed — someone other than the doer confirmed it, where the job warrants that.

Six states, and "blocked with a reason" is the one that changes management behaviour: a queue of nineteen blocked jobs where fourteen say "awaiting part" is a procurement problem being reported as a maintenance problem.

Fields worth making mandatory

1. Asset or location, chosen from a list rather than typed, so history accumulates against something.
2. What is wrong, described by the person reporting it rather than translated at intake.
3. Priority, from a scale with written definitions — otherwise everything is urgent.
4. Requested by, so the person who needs to be told about completion is recorded.
5. Target date, set when the job is assigned and not moved silently.
6. Time and parts used, captured at completion while the technician still remembers.
7. Evidence: a photograph of the finished work for anything that will be questioned later.

A completion without evidence is a claim. For any job that a customer pays for or a regulator may ask about, make the photograph or the reading part of closing the record, not an optional extra.

Keep the queue as a register

One row per work order with status, owner, dates and attachments is exactly the shape a register handles well, and Ettex Records gives you the filters that make the queue useful: open by owner, overdue, blocked by reason, closed last month. Where the person doing the work is out on site, Ettex Forms captures the completion — readings, parts, photograph, signature — at the point of work instead of on a clipboard that gets typed up on Friday.

When you need work order software instead

Be honest about the boundary. A register tracks jobs; dedicated work order software does things a register does not: generating preventive jobs automatically from meter readings or schedules, holding an asset hierarchy with parent-child failure history, reserving and depleting parts from stores, dispatching and routing technicians live, and recording labour against jobs for billing. If your operation depends on those, buy the software. If your problem is that nobody can say what is open, the register is the fix and it is available this afternoon.

Reports that make tracking worth the effort

• Open jobs by owner, with age — the single most useful view.
• Overdue against target, split by reason.
• Blocked jobs grouped by blocking reason.
• Repeat visits to the same asset, which is how a replacement case gets made.
• Completed last period versus raised, because a queue that only grows is a staffing fact.

Tracking sits between two neighbours: planned preventive maintenance generates a share of the queue before anything breaks, and the asset register is what the work orders attach to. A queue with no asset list underneath it can tell you what you did but never what keeps failing.