An order management system in a service company

An order management system is one place where an order is created, changes status and ends. It is not primarily about software, but about a rule: every order has exactly one record, one responsible person and a status that matches reality. Software only enforces that rule. Without it, management falls apart into e-mails, notes and one person's memory.

• One record per order. A second record means two people will disagree about what applies.
• An order's status should say who makes the next step. A status that does not tell you that is pointless.
• Responsibility belongs to a name, not a department. An order with no responsible person waits the longest.
• An order is created at the moment it is reported, not when it is planned.
• It is closed by the person responsible for it, and only when no log, material or signature is missing.

What an order management system has to do

Four things, and no more are needed at the start. First, accept an order from anywhere, that is from the phone, e-mail and a technician in the field, and turn it into one record. Second, assign a responsible person. Third, show the status in a way that makes clear who has to make the next step. Fourth, keep what happened on the order and who recorded it.

Everything else, meaning invoicing, stock, pricing and approvals, is an add-on. Companies that start with the add-ons usually end up with a long roll-out and the foundation left unresolved.

The test of whether the foundation works is simple. Take an order three months old and find out who was at the customer, what they replaced and why the appointment was moved twice. If it takes more than a few minutes, you do not yet have an order management system, even if one is installed.

The statuses that are enough

A status is not a description of the order's mood, but information about whose move it is. The following set covers ordinary service operations and can be narrowed or extended by industry.

Two statuses from the table are most often left out in practice, and they are exactly the ones that hold the most orders: waiting for the customer and waiting for material. Without them, both look like work in progress and nobody tracks how long the wait has been going on.

Responsibility belongs to a name

An order assigned to a department has no responsible person. An order assigned to a name does, even when several people are working on it. The responsible person does not do the work, but makes sure the order keeps moving.

The most common mistake is to equate responsibility with the technician. The technician is responsible for carrying out the job, not for the customer failing to provide access or for a part being awaited. As soon as these two roles are mixed, the order freezes the moment the technician leaves for another job.

A practical rule: every day, someone is able to answer the question of what is preventing the closure of any open order. If there is no such person, responsibility is not assigned, it only looks that way.

Where orders are collected from

From four sources: the phone, e-mail, reports from technicians in the field and the schedule of periodic checks. Each has its own trap.

The phone tempts you to delay the entry, because the person taking the call is usually busy. E-mail tempts you to leave it as an e-mail, so an order never arises from it. A technician's report is often dealt with on the spot and never reaches the system at all. Periodic checks are planned once a year and forgotten in between.

There is only one shared solution, and it is an uncomfortable one: an order is created at the moment it is reported, not when it is planned. Even an order with no appointment and no details is better than a four-day-old message in someone else's inbox.

Orders and history keeps technicians' logs, internal notes, attachments and a record of every change with one order, so there is no searching through e-mails. The practical impact shows during a complaint, when it is necessary to prove what was done at the customer and when.

A roll-out procedure without a big project

1. Write down the statuses you actually use, even if so far they exist only in your head. Only then cut them down to four to six.
2. For each status, decide whose move it is. Cross out any status for which you cannot say.
3. For every open order, name the responsible person.
4. Transfer only open orders into the system. The history does not need to be filled in; nobody manages closed orders.
5. Agree the rule that an order is created when reported and follow it for a week.
6. After a week, go through which statuses nobody used and remove them.

The sixth step is skipped most often, yet it is the cheapest. Unused statuses do not stay harmless, because the others stop trusting the statuses.

Order management and the plan are two different things

The order says what is to be done and what status it is in. The plan says who will do it and when. Companies often merge them into a single list and are then surprised that they cannot read either from it.

In the planning board, technicians are in rows and days in columns, so an assignment is created by dragging across cells and a conflict is reported on saving. The order stays where it belongs, and only its assignment is visible in the plan.

The difference shows when an order is not done on time. In a list it disappears, because it is "overdue". In the separated form it stays open in its status, and in the plan it is just moved to another day.

Keeping the status matching reality

An order management system stands or falls on whether statuses are switched in time. Copying from paper in the office in the evening will not ensure that, because it is done after the shift and with a delay.

Mobile for technicians runs in the browser; the technician opens their day in it, starts work and, on finishing, logs the tasks done and a note for the office. The status thus changes at the moment the event happened, and the office does not have to call to ask how it went.

In companies where jobs are reported only retrospectively, the gap between the status in the system and reality tends to be one or two days. That is exactly the period during which the customer cannot be told what stage their order is at.

When you do not need to deal with this

As long as one or two orders run at a time and one person plans them, a workbook works and a new tool will bring more work than benefit. The same applies to companies that do not plan people over time.

The turning point comes when it starts to happen that two people change the same order and one of them does not know, or when the customer cannot be answered without ringing round the technicians. From that moment on, it is not about tidiness for its own sake, but about having the answer exist before someone needs it.

Frequently asked questions