Glossary

Work order

In short

A work order is a record of maintenance work to be carried out on an asset, capturing what needs doing, who is assigned and how far along it is. It is the basic unit of work in a maintenance system, raised either by a request, an inspection failure or a preventive maintenance schedule. In Cohiva Control a work order moves through a server-enforced state machine, and every transition is written to an append-only history.

Work order

A work order is a record of maintenance work to be carried out on an asset. It captures what needs doing, which asset it relates to, who is assigned, and how far along the job is. The work order is the basic unit of work in any maintenance system: the thing a technician picks up, acts on and closes out, and the thing a manager tracks to see what is outstanding.

How work orders are raised

Work orders enter the system in a few ways. Some are raised manually, as a request when someone notices a problem. Others are generated automatically by a preventive maintenance schedule, raised on a time or meter interval so routine servicing happens without anyone having to remember it. Others again are created when an inspection item fails, turning a failed check straight into a job to be done. Whatever the source, the work order becomes the single place that job is tracked.

The work-order lifecycle

A work order is more than a flag that is open or closed; it moves through a defined lifecycle. In Cohiva Control that lifecycle is a server-enforced state machine with the statuses open, assigned, in progress, pending parts, completed and verified, plus cancelled. The allowed moves between those statuses are defined, and illegal transitions are rejected rather than quietly accepted. So a work order cannot jump from open straight to verified without passing through the steps in between, and the record reflects the real progress of the job.

Every transition is written to an append-only history row, which cannot be edited or deleted. That history is what lets a team reconstruct exactly when a job was raised, assigned, stalled waiting for parts, completed and verified, and it feeds maintainability measures like mean time to repair.

What a work order tracks

Beyond its status, a work order in Cohiva Control can carry a target time, roll up the labour cost of the work, and record the parts consumed against it so costs are captured in one place. Because the contractor-compliance gate is enforced at assignment, a work order cannot be assigned to a contractor whose insurance, licence or induction is expired, missing or unverified.

Part of the Cohiva platform

Cohiva Control is part of the Cohiva platform. Leisure operators often run it with Cohiva Complex, and finance teams connect it to Cohiva Crunch for the general ledger. Explore the platform at www.cohiva.app.

Frequently asked questions

What information does a work order hold?
What work is needed, the asset it relates to, who is assigned, its current status, and often a target time and the labour and parts used. It is the single record a team works from for a given job.
How is a work order raised?
It can be raised manually as a request, generated automatically by a preventive maintenance schedule on a time or meter interval, or created when an inspection item fails.
What is a work-order state machine?
It is the defined set of statuses a work order can move through and the allowed transitions between them. In Cohiva Control the statuses are open, assigned, in progress, pending parts, completed and verified, plus cancelled, and illegal transitions are rejected.