Work request form: the intake that decides whether a job gets done right

A work request form is how someone who is not in the maintenance team asks for something to be fixed, installed, moved or checked. It is the cheapest point in the whole job to prevent a wasted visit: a request that says where, what and how urgent saves a technician a trip to find out. Most facilities teams do not have a work order problem so much as a work request problem — the jobs arrive by email, corridor conversation and sticky note, and half of them are missing the one fact that matters.

What a work request form should ask

• Location, picked from a list of buildings, floors and rooms rather than typed freely.
• The asset or item, where it can be identified — a door number, a machine tag, a room fitting.
• What is wrong, in the requester's words, with a photograph if possible.
• Impact: is anyone unsafe, is work stopped, is it inconvenient but tolerable.
• Who is asking and how to reach them, so the technician can call rather than hunt.
• Access constraints — times the space is free, keys needed, escort required.

Fields to leave off

Priority chosen by the requester, cost codes and technical categories. Requesters mark everything urgent and cannot know the trade that will fix it. Ask about impact instead and let whoever triages set the priority against written definitions. The requester's job is to describe the problem precisely; classifying it is yours.

A photograph field does more for a work request form than any other single change. It answers "which one", "how bad" and "is that really broken" before anyone walks over.

Triage what arrives

1. Acknowledge every request automatically with a reference, so nobody chases by phone.
2. Screen for safety first: anything describing a hazard is made safe before it is scheduled.
3. Set priority from impact against written response times — three levels are enough.
4. Merge duplicates: the same broken light reported by five people is one job with five followers.
5. Convert accepted requests into work orders with an owner and a target date.
6. Reject or redirect with a reason, and tell the requester — silence is what makes people email the manager next time.

Forms and the work order queue

The request and the work order are different records with different owners: the requester owns the description, the maintenance team owns the job. Ettex Forms handles the request side with required fields, location lists and photo upload, and each submission lands in Ettex Records where it can be triaged, merged and turned into a job. From there the job follows the states covered in work order tracking, and the visit is closed with a service report.

Requests are also the raw material for later analysis: patterns in what people report, and where, show up in the maintenance report long before they show up as a budget problem.

Keep requesters informed

• Received — with the reference and the priority it was given.
• Scheduled — with a date or a window.
• Done — with a one-line summary of what was done.
• Declined or deferred — with the reason and what happens next.

Four notifications answer nearly every "any update on my job" message. Requests that recur against the same asset are also the best early warning for planned preventive maintenance: if a door closer is reported every month, it belongs on a schedule rather than in the reactive queue.