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About Work Orders

A work order is a standardized document that details a maintenance task or other work. It includes information such as:

  • The asset that needs maintenance.
  • The location where the work will happen.
  • Who is responsible for completing the work.
  • Which parts you need to do the work.
  • When the work should start, and when it should be completed by.
  • How long the work should take.

Administrators and Full Users can create and manage work orders for an organization. For more information, see Create a Work Order.

  • Administrators can generate reports to get insights into their organization's work orders. For more information, see About Work Order Reports.

Types of Work Orders​

Standard Work Orders​

A standard work order details a maintenance task for a single asset or location, or some other work. You can create a standard work order from scratch or by using a work order template.

Parent and Sub-Work Orders​

For line-based maintenance, maintaining multiple instances of the same asset, or other complex work with multiple subtasks, you can create parent work orders with sub-work orders. When you add sub-work orders to a work order:

  • The original work order becomes the parent work order.
  • The work orders for each asset become sub-work orders.

As you complete the sub-work orders, you can track the overall progress from the parent work order. For more information, see Parent and Sub-Work Orders.

Cycle Count Work Orders​

Cycle counts help you keep your parts inventory in MaintainX® in sync with your real world inventory. A cycle count is a reconciliation operation where you count real world parts to ensure the quantity in MaintainX matches the quantity you physically have on hand. You schedule cycle counts in the Cycle Counts module, and conduct them using a special type of work order that appears in your work order queue. For more information, see About Cycle Counts.

External Work Orders​

An external work order is a shareable work order that you send to people outside of your MaintainX organization. They're useful for organizations that outsource work to 3rd parties. Recipients have limited access to shared work orders. For more information, see External Work Orders.

MaintainX Assist in the Work Order Lifecycle​

MaintainX Assist can be integrated throughout a work order lifecycle, from creation to completion. AI-supported work order features help accelerate, standardize, and simplify workflows, while continuously building an internal knowledge base which supports MaintainX Assist in providing accurate and tailored support over time.

Important

While MaintainX Assist supports the creation and execution of work orders, your review and approval are always required.

MaintainX Assist helps you:

Create Work Orders​

You can use MaintainX Assist to create work orders. In a MaintainX Assist-enabled asset's details, ask the AI assistant questions about your asset. From the answer, you can create a work order or a work order template.

When generating a work order, MaintainX Assist automatically adds the following:

  • The asset's name in the Asset field.
  • MaintainX Assist's answer in the Description field.
  • The asset's files in the Files field.

MaintainX Assist accelerates the initial creation process of the work order, while giving you full control to review, finalize, and validate the work order. For details, see Create a Work Order from a MaintainX Assist Answer.

Enrich Work Orders​

When you complete a work order with a MaintainX Assist-enabled asset, you can receive task-specific suggestions from MaintainX Assist. These suggestions are based on MaintainX Assist's answers, historical knowledge (e.g., past work order summaries), and documents uploaded to your assets.

MaintainX Assist can assist you by:

MaintainX Assist optimizes your workflow by suggesting ways to enrich your work orders based on your continued interaction with it.

Generate Work Order Briefs​

Before you start working on a work order, you can generate a brief to quickly understand its context and requirements. The brief provides a clear, high-level summary of what needs to be done, why it matters, and how to proceed. The brief includes the following sections:

  • Context: A summary of the work order details.
  • On This Asset: The attached asset's current status and key events associated with it.
  • On Similar Assets: A list of key events associated to similar assets, if any.

For details, see Generate a Work Order Brief.

Generate Work Order Summaries​

After you complete a work order, MaintainX Assist can assist you by reviewing work order details, including procedure details if any are attached, and your written or recorded completion notes. For details, see Add a Summary to a Work Order.

As you add work order summaries to MaintainX Assist-enabled assets, MaintainX builds a knowledge base that MaintainX Assist uses to provide better, data-driven answers to questions about your assets.

Create an Internal Knowledge Base​

Continuously interacting with MaintainX Assist throughout the work order lifecycle enables the creation and enrichment of your organization’s knowledge base. This knowledge base accelerates daily workflows and supports more accurate, data-driven answers to asset-related questions.

Work Order Concepts​

Here are some important concepts about work orders.

Preventive vs. Reactive Work Orders​

Work orders can be Preventive or Reactive.

  • Preventive work orders are for scheduled maintenance or other recurring scheduled work. Most of the time, you set them up as chains of recurring work orders.
  • Reactive work orders are for responding to one-off events like machine breakdowns or urgent repairs. Most of the time, reactive work orders are not recurring.

Work Order Chains/Recurrence​

A work order chain is a series of recurring preventive work orders to perform the same maintenance task at regular intervals. For example, you can create a work order chain for daily inspection of a machine. For more information, see Create a Work Order.

Work Order History​

Work order history exists when you create work orders for a MaintainX entity such as Locations or Assets. This data shows how many work orders are created and completed on the entity within a selected date range. This information lives in the details pane of the selected items of the entity that you want the work history for.

Work Order Brief​

A work order brief is an AI-generated overview of a work order’s key details. This feature is available for work orders with Open, On Hold, or In Progress statuses.

Before you start working on a work order, you can generate a brief to quickly understand its context and requirements. The brief provides a clear, high-level summary of what needs to be done, why it matters, and how to proceed.

MaintainX Assist generates the brief using information from the work order’s title, description, associated asset, procedures, comments, and summary.

The brief appears in the Brief card within the work order details.

Work order brief card displaying key details and summary information
A work order Brief card displaying key details and summary information

It includes the following sections, which you can expand to view the details:

  • Context: A summary of the work order details.
  • On This Asset: The current status of the associated asset and its key events.
  • On Similar Assets: Key events from similar assets, if available.
Work order brief expanded view showing Context, On This Asset, and On Similar Assets sections with collapsible details
A work order brief expanded view showing Context, On This Asset, and On Similar Assets sections

After generating a brief, you can prompt MaintainX Assist to ask follow-up questions or request additional information about the work order. You can, for example, ask for a list of required tools, procedures to add, or additional work tasks.

If you update work order details (e.g., title, description, procedures) after generating a brief, you can generate it again to reflect the latest changes. For more information, see Update a Brief.

Work Order Summary​

A work order summary is a written or recorded voice note you add to a work order to document how you completed it. The summary functionality is available for work orders with a MaintainX Assist-enabled asset.

Work order summaries are based on work order details, including procedure details if any are attached, and your written or recorded voice notes.

With work order summaries, you build a knowledge base that MaintainX Assist uses to provide better, data-driven answers to questions about your assets. You can refer back to this knowledge base every time you ask MaintainX Assist about an asset and see from which sources its response was extracted (e.g., work order summaries or asset manuals).

When you complete a work order, you can record or write a voice note that describes the work you did. For example: “Inspected the machine as indicated in the work order. Noticed a wheezing sound from the motor compartment. The machine shook during stability tests. A screw inspection may be required.”

MaintainX Assist will:

  • Analyze your note.
  • Collect context from the work order details.
  • Generate a summary.
  • Attach the summary to the asset's internal knowledge base, which MaintainX Assist reuses to answer new questions about the asset.
  • Add the summary to your work order details and the Comments section.

To further your understanding of the voice note and guide you in the creation of maintenance tasks, MaintainX Assist automatically organizes your voice note into three sections:

  • Diagnosis & Findings: A summary of your voice note, highlighting root causes, observations, and key insights.
  • Repairs Performed: A list of repairs you performed.
  • Challenges: An account of the difficulties you encountered while executing the work order.
Screenshot showing the Summary field with Diagnosis & Findings, Repairs Performed, and Challenges sections.

The generated summary is then shared with your organization and made available in the MaintainX applications.

info

Voice notes are limited to 2 minutes. MaintainX discards voice note recordings after generating summaries.

You can add a work order summary in a language different from your organization's display language. MaintainX Assist will translate your voice note accordingly. Administrators can configure the organization's display language in the organization settings. For details, see Organization Settings.

You can ask MaintainX Assist to translate your voice note into another language. MaintainX Assist defaults to English if the selected translation language is not supported.

tip

You can access summaries attached to your assets and work order.

In the MaintainX Assist-enable asset or work order details, do the following:

  1. Select (Ask MX Assist).
  2. Select (Sources).
  3. In the Source type drop-down, select Work order summaries.

Corrective Actions​

A corrective action is a work order created manually or automatically in response to an event or a condition such as Anomaly Detection or through a specific procedure action in a work order chain. For more information, see Trigger a Work Order.

Resource Planning​

MaintainX has a dedicated view for resource planning. You can use the Workload View to plan, schedule, and assign work from work orders. You can see users' capacity, which helps you balance your team's workload. For more information, see About Resource Planning.

Time and Cost Tracking​

availability

Available for Enterprise plans. For more information, contact your MaintainX Representative.

While completing a work order, users can record work order time and costs in the Time & Cost Tracking section in the work order details page. This feature shows Administrators:

  • How many units of a part are in stock.
  • Time spent on a specific work order.
  • Other costs related to a specific work order.

You can export this data through the Reporting module.

For more information on tracking time and costs in a work order, see Complete a Work Order.