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Try for freeKey Takeaways:
- The average cost of equipment downtime stands at $125,000 per hour.
- Automated work order tracking can minimize breakdowns and extend asset lifespan.
- It also streamlines inventory management, ensuring critical parts are always in stock.
If you’re managing maintenance at a manufacturing facility, you’re likely issuing work orders nonstop.
And you know how easily a missed, late, or misunderstood work order can spiral into costly downtime, production delays, and unexpected expenses.
But what if you could prevent that?
Using a specialized application to track work orders keeps your maintenance team organized, speeds up response times, and ensures nothing slips through the cracks.
In this article, we’ll explore six ways work order tracking helps you cut costs and keep your facility running smoothly.
1. Minimizes Equipment Downtime
Keeping unplanned equipment breakdowns and the resulting downtime to a minimum is the holy grail of effective facility maintenance.
To achieve this, manufacturing businesses implement various practices, from conducting preventive maintenance and regular inspections to prioritizing emergency repairs.
That’s understandable since unplanned downtime is expensive, both in terms of lost productivity and increased repair costs.
A 2023 survey of 3,215 plant maintenance leaders around the globe showed that unexpected equipment failures, on average, cost companies $125,000 per hour.
The same survey indicated that more than two-thirds of companies experience unplanned outages at least once a month.
You can see the breakdown of downtime frequency below.
These high costs and frequent failures underline the need for a more efficient way to manage maintenance than with error-prone and time-consuming paper-based work orders and spreadsheets.
Enter a Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS) that, among other things, digitizes and streamlines the work order tracking process.
Such systems enable you to easily create, schedule, assign, and prioritize work orders, significantly contributing to faster issue responses and resolutions.
For instance, a cloud-based CMMS allows employees to quickly report equipment issues and request repairs through various channels, such as a mobile app, QR codes, or web portals.

Once reported, the issue is immediately visible in the system, and the ensuing work order can be prioritized over less urgent tasks, thus minimizing downtime.
The digital work order tracking systems offer automated notifications and real-time emergency and regular maintenance updates.
This helps prevent miscommunication and ensures no task is overlooked.
Additionally, a CMMS gives technicians access to detailed maintenance histories and digital checklists, ensuring they have all the necessary information to perform repairs quickly.

Digital work order management significantly accelerates response times, helping your company reduce downtime during critical operations. This leads to shorter disruptions and lowers associated costs.
2. Extends Asset Lifespan
Building on minimized downtime, another way work order tracking saves money is by extending the lifespan of assets.
A mobile CMMS enables you to automate preventive maintenance tasks, ensuring that routine inspections, servicing, and part replacements are completed on schedule.
Regular and proactive maintenance prevents excessive wear and tear, significantly lowering the risk of premature equipment failure.
For example, a manufacturing facility can use a CMMS to automatically schedule monthly lubrication for conveyor belts, preventing breakdowns and extending their operational life.
However, while scheduling preventive maintenance seems straightforward, research shows it remains a major challenge for many facilities.

A CMMS directly addresses this challenge by automating maintenance schedules and sending timely reminders for upcoming tasks.
This ensures that preventive maintenance is never overlooked, reducing the likelihood of equipment failure due to missed inspections or delayed servicing.
The ultimate result is an extended asset lifespan.
Moreover, since CMMS stores detailed maintenance records, maintenance managers can make informed decisions based on past repairs, part replacements, and service intervals.
This historical data helps them optimize maintenance strategies and prevents unnecessary strain on equipment, further prolonging their lifespans.

What’s more, easy access to maintenance history and repair logs enables technicians to more accurately diagnose the issue and perform targeted repairs.
This also prevents small equipment issues from escalating into major failures that could shorten an asset’s lifespan.
By combining automated scheduling, detailed maintenance records, and easy access to essential resources, work order tracking ensures smooth preventive maintenance.
This proactive approach not only maximizes equipment longevity but also delivers long-term cost savings and greater operational reliability.
3. Optimizes Resource Allocation
With downtime under control and assets lasting longer, you can shift focus to using resources—materials and labor—more efficiently.
Work order tracking systems help prevent overstocking and underutilizing critical resources like spare parts and other inventory.
Why is this important?
Because efficient resource management is essential for maintaining smooth operations and controlling costs.
Without proper tracking, you risk overstocking inventory—or worse, lacking essential parts when equipment fails.
This imbalance can result in wasted spending and costly production delays.
Jeff Shiver, CEO of People and Processes Inc., a consulting firm specializing in maintenance and reliability best practices, highlights how missing key spare parts contributes to downtime.

Given the significant percentage of downtime caused by a lack of inventory, it is crucial to be able to quickly review stock levels and their locations.
Beyond tracking work orders, a CMMS maintains accurate records of inventory and integrates these records with maintenance schedules.

You can easily view the quantities of spare parts and materials in stock, as well as their locations and associated costs.

Additionally, most CMMS solutions allow you to set minimum stock levels for critical parts and materials, sending automatic alerts when inventory falls below these defined thresholds.

A CMMS can typically be integrated with your warehouse management system, ensuring seamless synchronization between maintenance and inventory operations.
This integration ensures that spare parts and materials are ordered only when needed, helping to avoid unnecessary overstocking and reducing inventory carrying costs.
Overall, work order tracking systems optimize resource allocation by aligning work tasks and inventory with maintenance needs.
Ultimately, this ensures your technicians always have the right tools, parts, and materials available at the right time, resulting in time and cost savings.
4. Reduces Labor Costs
Labor costs make up a significant portion of operational expenses in maintenance-heavy industries.
These are the things that can quickly drive these costs even higher:
- Overtime
- Duplicated efforts
- Inefficient task management
- excessive administrative work
Work order tracking through a CMMS directly addresses all of these challenges.
For starters, inefficiency is eliminated by automating task scheduling and assignment.
Facility managers can easily prioritize maintenance tasks and assign them based on each technician’s availability, skill set, and workload.
When doing so, they don’t need to dig through paperwork or spreadsheets to see which technicians are available but can instantly do so on any internet-connected device.
Once assigned, the responsible technician, the work order status, and its planned execution are all clearly visible in one centralized system.

This streamlined scheduling prevents bottlenecks and eliminates the risk of assigning the same task to multiple workers, reducing duplicated efforts and wasted labor hours.
It also ensures tasks are evenly distributed and completed on time, minimizing the need for costly overtime.
After task completion, you can review technician performance and task progress, which can help identify areas for future improvement.
Beyond task management, digitized work order tracking significantly reduces administrative labor.
Traditional paper-based systems and spreadsheets demand hours of manual data entry, status updates, and reporting.
In contrast, a CMMS automates these processes, keeping task data organized and easily accessible for real-time review.

Such dashboards accelerate workflows and allow administrative staff to focus on more productive, value-adding tasks.
Additionally, mobile CMMS access allows technicians to instantly receive work orders, update task statuses, and access critical repair information without returning to a central office.
This reduces downtime between tasks, minimizes travel time between locations (if applicable), and maximizes time spent on actual maintenance work.
In summary, work order tracking reduces labor costs by streamlining task management, optimizing workforce allocation, and eliminating unnecessary administrative tasks.
5. Improves Decision-Making with Data-Backed Insights
In industrial maintenance, effective decision-making relies on having accurate, up-to-date information.
Work order tracking systems provide managers with valuable historical data on costs, task completion times, recurring equipment issues, and more.
This gives managers a clear view of operations, allowing them to:
- pinpoint inefficiencies,
- uncover cost-saving opportunities, and
- address the root causes of frequent breakdowns.
Another handy feature is the ability to generate pre-built, customizable reports that enable managers to quickly analyze maintenance performance without manual data gathering.

In addition to pre-built, easily generated reports, the system allows you to schedule reports to be delivered to key stakeholders at specified times.
Likewise, data export options in various formats, such as Excel or PDF, make it easier to share and review data across departments.
These features improve transparency and ensure that everyone involved in maintenance operations is aligned and informed.
Ultimately, this translates into faster, more accurate decision-making.
Beyond reporting, you can leverage interactive dashboards to consolidate real-time data and obtain a clear, visual overview of critical maintenance operations.
For instance, you can monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) like equipment downtime, maintenance costs, and task completion rates.

This KPI visibility supports proactive maintenance planning and resource allocation, facilitating further cost savings and quality improvements.
You can also leverage these KPIs to evaluate your organization’s maintenance performance compared to competitors and industry standards.
Moreover, role-specific dashboards and data access authorizations ensure that relevant information is accessible to the right team members while protecting sensitive data.
Given all the above, the work order tracking system’s features clearly enable you to extract the insights you need to make more data-driven, better-informed maintenance decisions.
6. Prevents Billing Errors
Accurate work order tracking is essential for maintaining financial precision by preventing duplicate payments, overcharges, and missed invoices.
This accuracy is crucial for internal accounting and managing outsourced maintenance work.
Of course, when they occur, billing errors can adversely impact your company’s bottom line.
However, a cloud-based work order tracking app like our WorkTrek ensures that every work order and its associated costs are thoroughly documented and accounted for.
Several key features support billing accuracy, beginning with time and progress tracking.

You can confirm that labor costs accurately reflect the work performed by continuously monitoring tasks and recording the time spent on each.
Field technicians can easily clock in and out using the WorkTrek app, which enables the automatic and precise logging of work hours.
Additionally, they can log detailed activity records and track the time spent on individual tasks, providing full transparency into labor and project costs.

These digital work logs can also be used to attach photos and documents to provide context, as well as to highlight important issues.
Additionally, the same work log can be leveraged for seamless expense tracking.

Expectedly, recording all work-related costs directly at the source where all other relevant details are available further enhances billing accuracy.
This approach eliminates guesswork, prevents misallocated expenses, and streamlines cost allocation across departments, projects, or clients.
Managers can easily review and approve work orders while being aware of all expenses upfront before authorizing payments.
This process ensures that only verified work and approved expenses are billed.
Additionally, both managers and technicians can sign or request digital signatures for completed tasks and other approvals.

Combined with a user-friendly and intuitive interface, all these features empower you to streamline work order and expense tracking processes, increasing their accuracy.
As a result, you can enhance process transparency, minimize billing errors, and protect your bottom line.
Conclusion
Effective and accurate work order tracking offers numerous cost-saving benefits, from reduced downtime and extended lifespan to data-driven decisions and minimized billing errors.
As explained, these savings can be achieved by using maintenance management software.
Such tools streamline workflows, improve real-time communication, and ensure accurate data capture throughout the work order process.
With the right solution, your team can operate more efficiently, reduce operational costs, and maintain better control over maintenance activities, ultimately boosting profitability.
WorkTrek can transform your work order tracking. Try it for free today and see how.