Work Order Preparation and Planning

A work order can be created in several ways depending on different assumptions. An inquiry for work can either come from a repair work order, a separate work order from a PM (Preventive Maintenance) action, a service request or fault report, or from IFS/Project. This process is used for both internal and external maintenance. When using internal maintenance, you have your own employees in the business who have knowledge of maintaining the objects within the company. By external maintenance we mean all kind of service or maintenance performed against a customer and his objects. 

The Work Order Preparation and Planning contains the following steps: 

• Evaluate the service requests and the fault reports. You can either query for the work order, or receive information on the work order from the event server. Evaluate it and change the status of the work order. 
• Plan and prepare Separate and Route Work Orders, on time, material, operation, customer, etc. Specify a connection between the work order and an existing project activity. If you need material for the work but do not have it in the inventory, make a requisition and release a purchase order. When you have the material in stock, enter the number of parts you require for the work, and afterwards you can possibly make a reservation. If you do not have internal crafts with the skill to perform the work, you can make a requirement for the external craft. Make a requisition for the operation and release a purchase order. When internal craft is about to perform the work, you have the possibility to plan the operation in the Gantt chart. Use the Gantt chart to get a general survey of available profiles, crafts, and maintenance organizations. If the work requires specific tools or facilities, you can also pre-plan a separate work order with that information. These requirements can be organized through jobs. Also, standard jobs can be connected to the work orders through jobs to simplify the process. Estimate the budget for the work order by looking over the costs. 
• Create a repair work order on the broken serial object or the non-serial part to be corrected. You have to define the repair workshop where the serial object can be repaired.  With the help of the system, you have control over where the serial part is, the running costs for the serial object, which repair has been done on the object, etc. You always have the possibility to follow the serial object as a component among other components within the establishment. The three possible destinations for the serial object include the facility, the repair workshop, and the inventory. The parts that are not registered in the system, such as traditional serial objects, are called non-serial parts. The reason not to register these parts as serial parts is because they are not in need of detailed information such as serial transaction history and repair costs, and that you want to save the administration of the part. If a non-serial part gets broken, the system can be configured such that it automatically creates a repair work order for this part. Once the broken part is repaired, it will be returned to inventory. The customer then has to scrap the part, or move the part into inventory before the repair work order can be set to Finished.
• Execute the work order. Print the work order, and if you are using any serial objects or non-serial parts, create a pick list and issue the parts that are needed for the work order. If no parts are included, simply change the status to Started and perform the work on the work order. 
• When the work is performed you simply change the status to Work Done.

Work Order Preparation and Planning through Mobile Workforce Management

The preparation and planning of the work order can be done automatically by using the scheduling capabilities of Mobile Workforce Management. With the integration between IFS Applications and Mobile Workforce Management, it is possible to transfer work orders and employees to be scheduled using the Dynamic Scheduling Engine (DSE). For more information on how work orders are scheduled in the Dynamic Scheduling Engine please refer to the following online document: Schedule Work Orders with Mobile Workforce Management.