A work order is a task or job for a customer which is schedule or assigned to someone. Not all tasks and jobs are assigned or defined as work orders, but many of them are.
And so a 'construction' work order is the same as the above, but applied to the construction industry or construction projects.
Because there are so many parties working and collaborating on construction projects, there are many opportunities for work orders to be issued. They may be issued to a subcontractor, specific service or even a product-based company.
Work orders can even be issued internally, with many large companies relying on work orders to move jobs and tasks between and across departments.
In the construction industry, it's common for work orders to be created following inspections and audits. These inspections and audits often surface something which needs to be rectified with a specific job or task - or 'work order'.
Construction work orders can be linked to bills of materials and be used as invoices, depending on the normal practices of a particular contractor or company and the nature of the work order or projects.
What we care most about for the sake of this article is your construction work order format. The format you choose and use for your work orders can have significant impact on the outcome of your work orders and work in general.
In fact, the format of your work orders on construction projects might just be one of the most overlooked piece of documentation, which many companies are 'paying for' in delays, lost productivity and poor communication.
The most common formats for work orders in construction are word, excel and PDF. These formats are formats which have been used and relied on since the advent and adoption of computers as a means to manage work and documentation.
While there was nothing wrong with using word, excel and PDFs for work orders in the past; today, it's an outdated means of managing work orders.
Newer and more modern approaches to work orders aren't just 'better', they improve how work orders are sent and received, signed off and shared, stored and found in the events of disputes and more.
What are some of the problems with word, excel and PDF formats for work orders?
These are just a few of the issues associated with word, excel and PDF work order formats.
Anyone who has used these formats for their construction work orders have usually experienced the inefficiencies and inadequacies of these systems.
So what is a better construction work order format then?
The best construction work order format for your work orders today are software-based work orders. Work order and digital document management systems enable companies to digitise and streamline how they create, organise and track their work orders in a single system.
We'll dive into the details of these work order formats below, but in a nutshell, a digital work order format enables a company to streamline how they create, capture, organise and track work orders:
Create - In this format, construction work orders can be chosen from a free library or created from scratch with a drag and drop builder with no need to space formatting and other tinkering.
Capture - Work orders can be filled out directly on construction sites using a mobile or tablet, or filled out on a computer just like in word or excel.
Organise - A modern construction work order format enables real-time syncing, which means that every time a work order is created or signed off, it is instantly synced and sent to a central system. These systems can also automatically organise this type of information into specific projects and teams, so that every work order goes to the right place at the time of creation.
Track - Because all work orders are sent to a central system, tracking them is easy. People can see exactly when a work order was created or signed off, updated, download and can also see exactly where a work order is in the process - whether it's held up by the other party etc.
In terms of the actual 'format' of the work order, most work orders come with a few key sections:
As you can see from the below construction work order format, most good frameworks include most or all of these details, with most framework differing slightly based on the company, project etc.
A digital system for managing construction work orders allows a company to customise the exact questions and format of the work order using things like drag-and-drop functionality and smart fields.
So you have all of the power and flexibility of formats like word docs, excel and PDFs - but without the manual work and messiness involved with managing information in these formats.
