Are your repair procedures in need of repair? Every field service agency needs to periodically check its procedures to ensure the details haven’t become imprecise and confusing over time.
A three-part series of articles on Electrical Construction & Maintenance offers a three-step task list to help agencies develop good repair procedures.
- Determine whether your procedures need repair:
For field services agencies, assigning work to qualified individuals is always the right first step. Even qualified individuals benefit from well-documented repair procedures. There are lots of good service management systems that help companies automate the deployment of procedures once they are created. This way, when agencies create a work order or preventative maintenance call, the repair procedures and data collection points are automatically visible as part of the call. - Determine whether your procedures need repair:
For field services agencies, assigning work to qualified individuals is always the right first step. Even qualified individuals benefit from well-documented repair procedures. Include the right information: Good repair procedures should always include an outline of the major steps in the correct sequence, detailed data, clear statements, and easy-to-understand language. It’s also important to automatically display equipment location if you are tracking the customer asset profiles.A detailed repair procedure will feature a “head” section that includes the title, equipment name, equipment location, the crew needed, degree of technical difficulty, and estimated completion time. The actual technical steps should include lockout/tagout, safety, and environmental instructions. - Help prepare technicians before they arrive:
Don’t waste time forcing your technicians to drive back to the shop for tools. A good repair procedure should help them before they show up at the repair location. That’s why you’ll want to include a section that explains what’s needed to make that repair. A good procedure guide feature in service management should allow for tool and test equipment assignment. Don’t forget to also mention any special tools that the technician isn’t likely to carry. Finally, the Electrical Construction & Maintenance article notes that support personnel might need some of these items while the technicians are completing other preparations. For that reason, it’s important to keep this information in a separate section.
Source: Electrical Construction & Maintenance, August 2012