Follow one real request from start to finish
A work order is a record of a maintenance job: what needs attention, where it is, who is responsible and what happened. A request is the initial report. The difference matters when you compare licences and decide who needs access.
Choose an ordinary job from your operation, such as a noisy air handler or a packaging-line fault. Ask each vendor to demonstrate that same job with the same roles. A polished overview is less useful than seeing your technician find the right asset, document the work and hand it back.
- Submit a request without creating an unnecessary paid seat.
- Triage urgency, assign ownership and set a realistic due date.
- Open equipment history and instructions from the work order.
- Record labour, parts, photos and completion notes.
- Confirm the job was completed and retain a useful history.
Test the technician experience
Try the workflow on the devices your team will actually use. Check scanning, photo capture, font size and access with gloves removed. If part of your site has weak reception, test the offline behaviour rather than assuming a mobile app works without a connection.
Decide which fields are essential. Requiring every field on every task can reduce the quality of the record if staff rush through irrelevant questions. Ask whether templates can vary by job type while preserving mandatory information.
Questions to take into a demo
- Who can submit, approve, assign and close a request?
- Can you link repeat faults to the same asset?
- How are overdue jobs, duplicate requests and urgent work handled?
- What can requesters see after submission?
- Can closed work orders, attachments and labour records be exported?
- Which functions require a higher plan or add-on?
Know when you need a different category
If the main problem is customer appointments, technician dispatch, estimates and invoices, also evaluate field service management. If you need equipment maintenance history and recurring servicing, a CMMS is a natural category to investigate. Some products overlap; test the actual workflow before choosing.