From Incident to Emergency Work Order

When equipment fails unexpectedly — say a pump motor catches fire — several FreeMaint features come into play: asset incidents, work orders, HSE incidents and work permits. This guide shows the recommended order so every action is captured once, in the right place, with nothing duplicated.

The golden rule: one event, one chain

Record the event once as the parent record and let it drive the work that follows. The asset incident is the parent; the work order is the execution. When you link them, the incident carries the story and the work order carries the repair — you never type the same thing twice.

Recommended workflow (pump motor fire)

1. Make it safe and log the safety side — If there is fire, injury or a near-miss, raise an HSE incident first — injured persons, witnesses, immediate measures. This is the people-and-environment record.
2. Report the asset incident — On the affected asset, create an incident: what the asset was doing, the damage, photos, severity. This becomes the single source of truth for the equipment event.
3. Let the incident create the work order — Turn on automatic work-order creation so reporting the incident spawns one linked corrective work order. You do not create a separate work order by hand — the link prevents duplicates.
4. Take the asset down — Set the asset status to Down so downtime starts counting. Completing the work order restores it to Operational.
5. Protect high-risk work — For hot work after a fire, or electrical work, attach a work permit and a lockout/tagout to the work order. The job cannot start until the permit is approved and the lockout is verified.
6. Do the repair on the work order — Log time, parts, the failure category and the root cause. Mark the maintenance type Emergency or Corrective so it feeds reliability metrics.
7. Close the loop on the incident — Back on the incident, complete the root-cause analysis and the corrective and preventive actions, then move it through Monitoring, Verified and Closed.

Automatic vs manual work orders

Automatic work-order creation is an opt-in company setting and is off by default. With it on, every reported incident produces exactly one linked work order, and reporting the same incident again never creates a second one. With it off, you create the work order yourself and link it to the incident. Either way, aim for one work order per incident.

How to avoid duplicate or overlapping records

• One incident per event. Let it spawn the single linked work order rather than creating both by hand.
• Use intervention requests only for the intake path — when someone reports a problem that a planner then turns into a work order. For an incident you witnessed on an asset, go straight to an asset incident, not a request.
• An HSE incident and an asset incident can both exist for the same event, but only one work order performs the physical repair. Link that work order to the record that drove it and cross-reference the other.

Where intervention requests fit

An intervention request is for reporting a problem you want someone to action — typically from an operator or a requester. It can be flagged as an emergency, which (when your workflow allows it) auto-approves it and creates an emergency work order on the spot. Use requests for the report-it-to-someone path; use asset incidents for events you are investigating on a specific asset.