Transitioning to Digital: A Guide to Electronic Work Orders with Facilitron Works

This article guides Maintenance and Operations department leaders in making the switch from a paper-based work order process to electronic processing of work orders using Facilitron Works.

Case Study: Apple Valley Unified School District

Apple Valley USD did a great job building up demand for using devices and changing their process. This district distributed devices to all staff that were interested in using Facilitron Works - mostly to all the young team members. All workers had to finish their paperwork by the end of day. While the older team members had to sit in the office at the end of their shift doing paperwork, the younger team members finished their “paperwork” in the field. And, they were able to leave early, or at least had all their work already done! By the time Facilitron showed up for final training, the older team members were primed for the new system as they saw how easy it was for the rest of the team to finish their work.

Moving from a Paper System to an Electronic System

There are several aspects to be considered when moving your organization from a manual process to an electronic process: logistics, employee buy in, and needed devices. 

Logistics:

Your team at minimum will need smartphones or internet enabled tablets to access Facilitron Works. Each worker will need a Maintenance Tech user account set up in the work order system. This Maintenance Tech account will then be linked or associated to the worker profile. Note: when setting up these accounts be sure to add the workers' email address to the worker account itself to enable the automatic email notice feature for workers getting email notification of work orders being assigned to them. Please see Creating a User's Worker Profile for more information.

Review-and-Close work flow is an option where site supervisors should be processing work orders independent of M&O. Please speak with your Facilitron Implementation Manager for more information.

Employee Buy In:

Change is hard for any organization and if yours is operating in old practices, moving away from paper work orders and into the new digital age can be challenging. Please see Apple Valley USD’s case study at the start of this article to see how they inspired their team.

Devices:

Some districts rely on smartphones for their workers, which can function well for most users. These districts prefer that one device issued to their workers, therefore they use smartphones for their maintenance technicians. However, workers who have been in the business for a long time may dislike using these devices, or may feel the screen real estate is limited and typing information into a work order on a phone can be challenging. 

Fortunately, there are options here to ease this transition. Facilitron Works uses responsive design so as to work well on various browsers on many devices. In addition, the Facilitron Works mobile app is designed to be simple and intuitive to use on an iOS or Android device. Please see Downloading the Facilitron Works or Facilitron FIT App for information on how workers may access our mobile application.