Work order incident type overview
Incident types act as service templates that allow users to quickly create work orders for the most common types of jobs that your organization performs. Incident types are also used to define specific work order issues and recommended resolutions. They can provide other details like duration, service tasks, products, and more.
Where work order types define the general category of a work order (such as inspection, repair, or maintenance), incident types define the specific request of a work order and add more details to the work order type.
For example, an incident type can be:
- A specific error code on a machine ("Error code 0048").
- A common customer complaint or request ("The building temperature is too high").
- A specific procedure ("Perform stress test").
Organizations benefit from using incident types because they codify issues, procedures, and resolutions, and help standardize processes across geographies and business lines. Incident types ensure all field technicians are performing the same actions to resolve work orders. If you discover better procedures, update the incident type, and it's immediately available to the entire organization.
Incident types represent a grouping of service tasks, products, and services. The service tasks, products, and services can be associated to multiple incident types.
For example, "Put on safety equipment" is a service task that needs to be completed frequently. Create this service task once and associate it to the relevant incident types. Then you can use one list of unique service tasks that are added to incident types, which create Incident Type Service Task records. The same is true for products, services, and characteristics.
Incident types help with reporting. They let you discover trends for specific issues. Rather than reporting on work order types to understand the number of repair work orders, an incident type lets you report on the number of power failures for a specific asset category.
With incident types, you can:
Define multiple issues or procedures that need to be completed by adding multiple incident types per work order.
Build service history by relating incident types to a customer asset.
Specify requirements for a work order and schedule it to multiple resources by relating incident types to requirement group templates.
Multiple entities
There are multiple entities involved that use incident types. Review this section before you write workflows or plug-ins.
Work order scenario
> Incident Type > Incident Product > Work Order Incident > Work Order Incident Product
First an Incident Type is created and a product is added to the incident creating an Incident Product. When the incident type is added to a work order, a Work Order Incident is created along with a Work Order Incident Product.
Tip
When you plan to change the incident type on a work order, delete the Work Order Incident first. Then, create a new Work Order Incident with a different incident type.
Agreement scenario
> Incident Type > Incident Product > Agreement Incident > Agreement Product > Work Order Incident
When you use incidents with Agreements, the incidents and related items are added to agreements first, and then passed along to work orders as they're generated by the agreement.
Multiple incident types
Only one work order incident can be the primary incident. It's either the first incident added or the one entered in the primary incident type field. There's a Boolean value on the work order incident type called Is Primary that can be used for business logic.