Asset Maintenance & Work Orders

Open Inventory, Assets, then the Maintenance pill at the top of the page. The maintenance page lists work orders — open, in progress, overdue and completed — and schedules, with counts of what is overdue and what is out of service. Each asset’s own page also has a Maintenance panel showing its schedules, its work orders, and its hours out of service and maintenance spend over the last 12 months, so the question “how much has this generator cost us this year, and how long was it down?” has an answer on the asset itself.

Two permissions govern it. View asset maintenance shows the maintenance page, work orders and the panel on each asset. Manage asset maintenance lets a person create and edit schedules and open, start, complete and cancel work orders. Someone with maintenance access but not asset access lands straight on the maintenance page from the Assets menu entry, which suits a workshop supervisor who has no business editing the asset register.

In practice: a Nairobi hospital’s biomedical engineer is given manage asset maintenance but not asset management. From the Assets menu she lands on the maintenance page, sees 3 overdue work orders and 2 assets out of service, and opens the ultrasound machine’s page to see 46 hours out of service and KES 185,000 of maintenance spend over the last 12 months — the figures she needs for the replacement case she is presenting to the board.

Choose New Schedule, or Add Schedule on an asset’s page. A schedule has an asset and a service name with optional instructions; an interval (every so many days, weeks, months or years); the date basis — count the next date from the day the last service was done, which suits most servicing, or from a fixed calendar, which suits inspections and certificates due on set dates whatever happened; a first due date; and the lead time, how many days early the work order opens (7 unless you change it). Optionally it carries an assignee, a repair vendor (or none, for work done in house) and an estimated cost, and a box marking that this service takes the asset out of use, which pre-ticks the out-of-service box when the work order is started.

Every morning AWRA opens a preventive work order for each active schedule whose due date, less its lead time, has arrived. The work order carries the schedule’s name, instructions, due date, assignee and vendor. The assignee is notified in the app; with no assignee, everyone who can manage maintenance is notified. A paused schedule opens no work orders, and deleting a schedule that already has work order history pauses it instead, so the history is kept. A retired asset cannot take a new schedule or work order.

In practice: a Kisumu flour mill sets a schedule “Generator 250-hour service” on its standby generator, every 3 months, from the last service, first due 15 March, lead time 7 days, assigned to its in-house electrician, with an estimated cost of KES 18,000 and the out-of-use box ticked. On the morning of 8 March the work order opens itself and the electrician receives an in-app notice. A second schedule, “Fire extinguisher certificate”, runs every 12 months on a fixed calendar, so the certificate date never drifts even when the inspector comes late.

A schedule has at most one live work order at a time, and closing that work order is the only thing that moves the next due date. That design means a skipped service is always a decision someone recorded, never a silent gap. Waiting for a second work order while the first is still open is a common confusion: a new one opens only after the current one is completed or cancelled.

The rule for the next date depends on how the work order closed and the schedule’s basis. Completed on a from-last-service schedule, the next date counts from the day the work was completed. Completed on a fixed-calendar schedule, or cancelled on either kind, the next date steps on from the date this one was due, past today — so closing a late job does not open a backlog of missed ones. The trade-off is why the basis matters: on a from-last-service schedule one late service pushes every later date back, which is wrong for a statutory inspection.

In practice: the mill’s generator service was due 15 March and completed on 2 April. On its from-last-service basis every 3 months, the next due date is 2 July. The fire extinguisher certificate, due 1 June on a fixed calendar every 12 months, is completed on 20 June; its next date is 1 June next year, not 20 June. And when the mill cancels a quarterly belt inspection due 10 January because the line was shut, that schedule steps on to 10 April — one cancelled job, not a queue of overdue ones.

Preventive work orders open themselves. For a breakdown, choose New Work Order, or Report Fault on the asset’s page, and give a title, a type (corrective or inspection), a priority (low, normal, high or urgent), a due date, an assignee and a vendor. Each work order gets a WO number. Starting it is where downtime begins: tick take out of service if the asset cannot be used while it is worked on, and AWRA records an asset movement sending it to maintenance, with the time it left.

Completing a work order requires a resolution, plus the condition afterwards and the labour, parts and other costs. You can back-date a completion, never forward-date it. If the asset was out of service it is returned, and the time it came back is recorded. A work order can instead be cancelled with a reason. Completing straight from open is allowed — the work happened — but with no start recorded there is no downtime to count, which is why forgetting the out-of-service box is one of the commonest mistakes: the asset stays available and no downtime is counted.

In practice: a Mombasa freight yard’s forklift loses hydraulic pressure at 10:00. The supervisor chooses Report Fault on the forklift’s page — corrective, urgent, due today, assigned to the workshop. The mechanic starts it at 10:20 with take out of service ticked, so the forklift moves to maintenance at 10:20. At 15:50 he completes it with the resolution “Replaced burst hydraulic hose”, condition good, labour KES 3,500 and parts KES 7,200. The forklift returns at 15:50 and its panel now shows 5.5 hours of downtime for the day.

Downtime follows a few rules designed for real workshops. Two jobs on one asset are one hold: the first work order to take it out of service moves it, a second joins the hold, and only the last to close returns it; overlapping work orders are counted once in downtime. The asset goes back to what it was — a laptop that was checked out to someone returns to that person’s checked-out state, because custody never moved, rather than to the store.

A later decision wins. If somebody marks the asset lost, damaged or retired while it is away, closing the work order leaves that status alone rather than quietly restoring it to service. A quantity pool — fifty identical chairs tracked as one record — cannot be taken out of service as a whole, so its work order is started without the out-of-service box. And a retired asset cannot take a new schedule or work order at all.

In practice: a Kampala school’s minibus goes in for a scheduled service on Monday morning, taken out of service. On Tuesday the mechanic finds a cracked windscreen and opens a second, corrective work order, also out of service; it joins the same hold. The service closes Tuesday afternoon, but the bus stays out because the windscreen job is still open; it closes Thursday at noon and only then does the bus return. Downtime counts once, Monday morning to Thursday noon — not the two jobs added together.

Labour, parts and other costs are recorded on the work order in the asset’s currency, or your organization’s base currency, and the asset page totals completed spend per currency. Recording a cost here is a maintenance record, not a payment: pay the repair vendor’s invoice as a supplier bill or expense in the usual way, and for stock items used on a repair, check them out as a normal stock adjustment so the store’s figures stay right.

A work order past its due date and still open is marked overdue and stays open — it is never quietly dropped. The day it slips, its assignee (or whoever opened it, if there is no assignee) is notified once. The maintenance page counts what is overdue, so a supervisor’s morning review starts with the jobs that have already slipped rather than with the ones that merely look busy.

In practice: the freight yard sends its reach stacker to an outside vendor for a gearbox overhaul. The work order records labour KES 42,000, parts KES 96,000 and other costs (transport) KES 6,500, KES 144,500 in all on the stacker’s panel. The vendor’s invoice is entered as a supplier bill and paid through the normal payment run, and the two spare filters taken from the yard’s own store are checked out as a stock adjustment. A separate inspection work order due 30 September is still open on 1 October; it shows as overdue and its assignee receives one notice that day.