‘Bucket’ work orders for recording hours are a sure indicator/sign of business process failure around the CMMS. These buckets of time fulfil a misplaced management need to account for the billing of maintenance hours, even though there is no evidence as to what work was done. As a simple rule of thumb I would suggest that any work order that has a duration longer than one week should be reviewed to be broken  down.

Recording hours – I believe it is very important that the maintenance culture should support the technician recording and taking credit for all the hours that he spends on a work order. This should include safety/review of procedures, wait time (permits/isolations etc.), looking out/collecting materials, wrench time, and fully recording what was done in the CMMS and providing feedback on the planning and content of the work order.