Why your maintenance history cannot answer questions

Most teams have years of work order history and cannot get a useful answer out of it. The cause is nearly always the same four things, and fixing them adds no fields to any form. It changes what is asked, not how much.

1. Work is not attached to a specific thing

A job filed against "Building 2" cannot tell you anything about a machine. A job filed against "AHU-3, second floor plant room" can. If a job is about a piece of equipment, it has to name that piece of equipment, and scanning a code at the machine is the only way that happens reliably.

2. Nobody wrote what was actually wrong

Closing notes that say "attended" or "repaired" are the most common entry in most systems and they carry no information. One sentence naming the actual fault is the entire raw material of failure history.

Ask for it as a required sentence at the end of the job, on the phone, at the machine. Not a code from a list of sixty. A sentence. Codes get answered with the first option; sentences get answered with the truth.

3. Cause codes have too many options

If a list has sixty entries, people pick from the top five and your data is a record of what appears at the top of a menu. Twelve options that get used honestly beat sixty that do not. Review them yearly and merge anything nobody picks.

4. Batch closing on Friday

Work closed in a batch from memory produces plausible timestamps and no evidence. It is a symptom rather than a cause: people batch-close when closing at the job takes too long. Count how many jobs are closed within an hour of the work happening. If that number is low, the phone experience is the problem.

The test for whether your history is any good

Pick one piece of equipment and try to answer three questions from the record alone: how many times has it failed in two years, what was actually wrong each time, and what did it cost. If you can, your data is fine. If you cannot, more reporting features will not help.

Start now, not with a clean-up

Do not try to fix the last three years. Change what is captured from today, and in twelve months you will have a year of answerable history. Retrospective data cleaning projects consume months and produce a slightly tidier version of the same unanswerable data.