Creating quality work requests

00:11

All right. Welcome to Lesson Seven, where we’re going to talk about the importance of Creating Quality Work Requests. There are two key points that I want you to take away from this lesson.

First, the Work Request is the beginning of the Planning Process. By providing quality information upfront, you’re going to make life a lot easier for your Planner. And you’re going to help them prepare a good job plan.

And second, you need to provide enough Relevant Information in that Work Request. For sure, it’s the Planner’s job to plan the work, but it’s not a Planner’s job to solve riddles or puzzles.

00:36

Now, as you’ve seen in the previous lesson, the first step in the overall Planning and Scheduling Process is to Identify and Prioritise the Work. And in this step, one key element I want to focus on is the Work Request.

00:51

A Work Request simply describes the maintenance work that needs to be completed, often raised by a Plant Operator or maybe by a Maintenance Technician. You need to understand that a Quality Work Request is the start of an efficient and effective Maintenance Process. Get this wrong and you’re going to create heaps of waste and delays in your Planning Process and potentially into your Maintenance Execution.

01:12

So, what makes a Quality Work Request? Well, it depends on a number of factors. But here are some of the things you want to see in a Work Request as a minimum. First, you want to see a clear and concise Title of the Work Request, and that needs to describe the fault, not really the solution. You don’t want people jumping to conclusions or pre-empting a proper diagnosis.

In the body of the Work Request, you want to add a more Detailed Description of the fault that has occurred and include what was already done, or what you know about the fault. If you know you’ve had a similar issue on another equipment recently, mention that. If you know it is going to require scaffolding, mention that. If you know that it will need two mechanics for six hours and specific parts because you’ve done the job before, well mention that.

01:53

Next, make sure your Work Request is Raised Against the Right Equipment at the right level in your asset hierarchy. Resist the temptation of just raising a Work Request at the top level or an easy level in your asset hierarchy because that will usually result in the work being harder to find, harder to group. And very often it’s also going to make developing breakdown codes that show up in your CMMS incorrect.

02:14

Now, you also want to make sure that you have Accurate Organisational Indicators, depending on which CMMS you use and how you’ve configured it. You want to make sure that the work flows to the right people. And similarly, you want to make sure that you include Accurate Fault, Damage, and Breakdown Codes. This once again depends heavily on which CMMS you use and how you’ve got it configured. But getting these things in early and correct is really important because it’s going to make the rest of the process flow as easy as possible, and it’s going to make the historical analysis of your failures a lot more efficient and effective.

02:45

Now, don’t get me wrong, we’re not trying to do the Planner’s job here by putting a lot of detail in the Work Request, but you don’t want to turn the Planner’s job unnecessarily into solving riddles or puzzles. If you have information, well then include it in the Work Request. So that what needs to be done is clear but also concise. If you know the issue at hand has occurred before, like I said earlier, mention it. If you know from experience what parts are required, list them.

03:09

A critical rule for Work Requests is Garbage In Equals Garbage Out (GI=GO). If you put a poor Work Request into your CMMS don’t expect your Planner to turn it into a high-quality Work Order or an excellent Work Pack for you to execute. Inadequate or inaccurate Work Requests waste time and effort.

03:26

Now, we’ve all heard examples of poor Work Requests like ‘Pump broken’ and then the technical history once the job is completed states, ‘Pump fixed.’ Well, they really don’t tell you much. And unfortunately, those kinds of Work Requests still happen a lot in many industries, many organisations across the globe and even in the airline industry. Now, the airlines in many ways are well ahead of most industries when it comes to maintenance but even there these things still happen.

03:51

I’ve got some real-life examples here to show you just to make the point. Here’s the first one. The Work Request is, “Number 3 engine is missing”. And so, the Close Out statement in the CMMS, “Engine found on right wing after brief search.”

Another example. “Something loose in the cockpit.” The Close Out statement, “Something tightened in the cockpit.” Now sure, these examples are quite funny, but as you can see, these are really poor-quality Work Requests that will just result in wasted time and effort. I mean, what can a Planner, or anybody, do with ‘something loose in a cockpit,’ right? You can’t work with that.

04:24

Now, because Planning and Scheduling is all about efficiency and reducing waste. We don’t want those poor-quality Work Requests slipping into our Planning and Scheduling Process because that will introduce waste at the beginning of the process and we’ll be at a loss from the first step. That’s why as a Maintenance Technician or a Plant Operator, you have a critical role in making sure new Work Requests are high-quality.

04:44

Now, how do you do that? How do you create Quality Work Requests consistently as an organisation? Well first, you and your team need to set the quality standards suitable for your organisation. That means you need to define what needs to be included in a good Quality Work Request. Create a simple job aid for your crew that explains what information each Work Request must include, which fields to fill in, and how to do it in your CMMS.

05:07

Make sure that job aid is then available to everyone who can raise Work Requests. And then make sure that everyone who raises Work Requests is also trained in the process and trained in using the CMMS. And finally, you need to make sure you enforce that quality standard you’ve just developed. That means you reject poor quality Work Requests, and you get the originator to add in the missing details before the Work Request is processed.

05:33

Now, a good option, if your CMMS has this ability, is to build that quality standard into your CMMS. You can do this as a template of questions that people have to answer as part of creating a Work Request. But even if you can’t pre-populate this into your CMMS, you can simply have these questions or prompts listed in your job aid.

05:50

So, what you see here is what this might look like if you were using SAP as your CMMS. You can get SAP to pre-populate a set of headers into Work Requests. And then people can just use these as a prompt to add in the information that they have. For example, you might want to have them describe the issue, add information on mitigations, corrective actions that were done. You may also want to include potential work scope; in case the requestor is actually familiar with the work. You can include location, access issues, and potentially, shutdown requirements.

06:19

All right. So that brings me to the end of this short lesson. The key points for this lesson are first of all; the Work Request is the beginning of the Planning and Scheduling Process. By providing good quality information upfront into the Process, you’re going to make life a lot easier for your Planner and you’re going to make it more feasible for your Planner to develop and prepare a good job plan.

And second, you need to provide enough Relevant Information in the Work Request. Now, for sure, it is the Planner’s job to plan the work. But it’s not a Planner’s job to solve riddles or puzzles.