The Nightmare of Accidentally Closed Work Orders

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The Nightmare of Accidentally Closed Work Orders

How do I stop my users from accidentally closing their work orders?

I had a user who accidentally closed 350 work orders, what should I do?

How can I un-close a work order?

 I get these kinds of questions all the time. The problem here is closed work orders are closed. We have a closed status for a reason. Its meant to say this work order is done and I don’t want anyone making any more changes to it. But what about human error? People make mistakes, right? Sure they do. The bottom line is; If you give users the authority to close work orders, sometimes they will accidentally close a work order (or 350 of them) on accident. So what can we do about it?

 The recommendation that I give to every client who brings up this topic is simple. Don’t give any user the ability to close a work order. I know what you are thinking. Am I crazy? How will work orders get closed? Let me explain.

 Go into the Security Group application. Go into all of your work order applications (Work Order Tracking, Quick Reporting, Activities and Tasks, etc), any application your users use and might change statuses in, and take away the Change Status to CLOSE option from everyone. EVERYONE! Even Maxadmin. Even from the system administrator users. No one gets it. If you ever NEED it, go into Signature Security and grant it on a temporary basis, then take it back away afterward.

 The next thing is to create a synonym status of complete (COMP). You can do this in the Domains app – just bring up the statuses for the WOSTATUS domain. Call this synonym status something like PRECLOSE or something like that. Make sure the users who should be able to ‘close’ work orders have authority to this new synonym.

 When a user needs to ‘close’ a work order, they will change the status to PRECLOSE or whatever you decided to call it. Since this is a synonym to the COMP status, you would still be able to make changes to the work order. If anyone accidentally changes the status of 350 work orders to PRECLOSE, no problem, no big harm done.

 Now the last step is to create an escalation in the Escalations application that runs every night at 3am. This escalation finds all work orders in the PRECLOSE status and changes their status to CLOSE if they have been in the PRECLOSE status for 72 hours or some duration that you are comfortable with. This duration represents the ‘window of opportunity’ to correct an accidentally closed work order. It’s up to you how big of a window to offer.

 Once all of this is done, you may need to update some reports or saved queries to filter out PRECLOSE work orders where you were filtering out CLOSED work orders.

 Hope this was valuable