Maintenance Request vs. Work Order: What’s the Difference?

What Is a Maintenance Request? 

When equipment starts to malfunction or property gets damaged, maintenance teams don’t always discover the problem right away. Instead, the people using or interacting with these assets, including customers or other staff members, are often the first to realize something needs to be fixed. Thus, they submit maintenance requests to inform maintenance staff.

Put simply, a maintenance request is the initial request to conduct a maintenance task — typically for repairs and maintenance, although it’s possible to request a more proactive inspection. Whether there’s a problem with a door lock, a laundry machine is overflowing with water or a conveyor belt is stuck, putting in a maintenance request lets maintenance teams know what needs to be fixed, and from there, maintenance supervisors can approve, prioritize and assign tasks.

Maintenance Request vs. Work Order

A maintenance request might seem like another way of saying work order, but the two terms refer to separate stages in typical maintenance workflows.

A maintenance request is usually the first step in a reactive maintenance sequence, in which someone notices that equipment or property breakdowns have occurred and wants to inform the maintenance team of the problem in an effort to get it fixed. After a maintenance team receives a maintenance request, then a manager typically reviews and approves the request, and finally issues a work order. The work order specifies what needs to be fixed and when, along with assigning the task to a specific maintenance employee or team.

Maintenance requests and work orders can occur across a wide range of industries such as retail, manufacturing, real estate and facilities management. However, the exact roles and processes involved with these actions can vary by industry.

For example, these kinds of service requests are especially common in residence halls at a university or individual units in an apartment complex or part of a larger housing facilities operation. Tenants will request repairs if something in their apartment or building needs to be fixed. Some facilities have software systems with maintenance request forms that can be used for submitting requests online, while others involve more manual maintenance requests via email or simply stopping by the front desk to make the work request in person.

From there, depending on the operational structure of the property management company, the process might be that the building supervisor or maintenance manager reviews the tenant maintenance requests and then assigns work orders to specific maintenance technicians. These work orders can also be either streamlined through a software system or handled more manually via email or text.

In other industries, maintenance requests might come from non-maintenance staff. For example, in a restaurant, kitchen staff might notice problems with equipment like dishwashers or stoves and need to submit maintenance requests to get those sorted out. Here, too, the process can vary between informal versus formal requests, such as by texting a maintenance manager or submitting a maintenance request form through an online system.

Sample Maintenance Request Form

While it might seem easier at first glance to just use channels like text or email for maintenance requests, the reality is that these requests can get unwieldy and easy to miss, especially at larger companies that oversee multiple buildings. As such, maintenance or facility management teams often prefer to create maintenance request forms that customers or other staff can fill out online, which then helps ensure all the necessary information is captured and maintenance teams can have a centralized record of what requests need to be handled.

Typically, a maintenance request form includes key information such as:

• Maintenance task description: You’re essentially describing the problem and addressing any specific needs required to fix it.
• Name of person submitting the maintenance request: Providing accurate contact information gives maintenance staff a clear idea about who this is for and who they can contact for follow-up. Tracking the requester can also help identify long-term trends — for instance, if the same store within a commercial space keeps having maintenance issues, that could signal that a proactive maintenance strategy might be beneficial there.
• Location of the asset where the work needs to be performed: Give maintenance staff clear instructions about where to go to complete the work, especially if accessibility might be an issue, since the requester might not be there at the time the work is being completed. Knowing the location can also help maintenance teams prioritize work orders. If a few issues need to be addressed at the same campus housing facility, it makes sense to assign one technician to complete them all at the same time instead of sending multiple technicians at different times.
• Priority status: Letting requesters submit their own priority status also helps maintenance supervisors know which work orders to prioritize. For example, a broken oven in an apartment might seem like a high-priority issue, but perhaps the tenant truly doesn’t see it as a big problem because they rarely cook and, therefore, submits the maintenance request as low priority. Maintenance managers can still adjust the priority status, but it helps to know the requester’s perspective first.
  

How to Use a CMMS to Streamline Maintenance Requests

If you’re looking to create an easier process for customers and staff to submit maintenance requests, a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) software will help centralize all that information. For example, with CMMS software like Coast, you can put QR codes on equipment or high-traffic areas for customers or staff to easily pull up maintenance request forms online, or you can direct them to these forms through your website.

From there, the CMMS provides features like:

• A digital, real-time record of maintenance requests
• The ability for maintenance managers to schedule and prioritize maintenance tasks based on the requests
• The ability to assign and monitor work orders
• A centralized repository of maintenance records for individual assets
• The ability to generate reports that track and analyze maintenance requests and work orders over a given period of time

See for yourself how Coast’s CMMS can help you streamline maintenance requests and work orders, and sign up for a free account today.