1. Service Management Implementation Guide
  2. Understanding Work Orders

Understanding Work Orders

You create work orders to formally request and schedule corrective maintenance, such as emergency repairs, and to record and communicate information about all of the details pertaining to the maintenance task. Circumstances for which you create a work order include:

  • You need to bill for the parts and labor that are required to fix a piece of equipment.

  • You need to send a technician to the site to repair the problem.

  • You use a service provider to resolve the problem and you need to create a voucher for payment.

You can create work orders for equipment covered by warranties. When you create a work order for a piece of equipment that is under warranty, a message appears to alert you that a warranty is in effect. You indicate a piece of equipment is under warranty by creating preventive maintenance (PM) service types for the warranty.

Work orders contain basic information such as the work order number, description, and the business unit to which the work order is charged. You can enter additional information, such as category codes, to further identify the work order. You can assign record types to work orders and then enter descriptive information into each record type, to communicate important information about a task to others who are involved. For example, you might want to include special instructions and information about the parts and tools that are needed to complete the task.

In addition, you can copy parts from a standard parts list or assign nonstandard parts to a work order. You can also assign detailed labor routing instructions to a work order. For example, you can:

  • Identify each work center that is needed to perform tasks.

  • Specify the sequence in which the tasks are performed.

  • Indicate the estimated duration of each task.

You can delete any work order from the system unless it has any of these characteristics:

  • It is used as a parent work order.

  • It has any account ledger transactions associated with it.

  • It has a parts list or a routing attached.

When you enter a work order, the system creates a record in the Work Order Master File table (F4801) and creates an extension table to store information that is pertinent to Service Management work orders, the Work Order Master Tag File table (F4801T).

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