January 6, 2025 | 1 min read How much time is data entry costing you? By: Jeffrey O'Brien Back to blog It’s 2025, but many organizations still rely on a paper-based work order system. Even those organizations that have a fully functional Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS) (opens in new tab) still rely on a hybrid, semi-automatic system that involves both the CMMS and paper printouts. Does this process sound familiar? The maintenance manager (opens in new tab) accesses the CMMS The maintenance manager prints out work orders and distributes the paper copies to the maintenance team The maintenance technicians (opens in new tab) complete the work The maintenance manager receives the completed work orders (opens in new tab), enters them into the CMMS, and closes the work orders How much time is wasted by the maintenance manager performing data entry duties? Typically, this is about an hour a day or 250 hours per year. As a maintenance manager, you have better things to do than print work orders, deliver papers, and type in completion notes written on those work order printouts. Some may argue that it is a good way to validate someone’s work, but regardless of whether they fill out the details on paper or digitally in the CMMS, you still have to trust they completed the work they signed off. Here’s a typical example for a team of 6 technicians and 3 work orders each per day: Item Every day Minutes a day Minutes a month Number of technicians getting printouts 6 6 6 Work orders printed per technician 3 18 work orders a day for all technicians 360 work orders a month for all technicians Minutes to print and deliver one technician’s work orders 1 6 minutes delivering papers to all technicians 120 minutes delivering papers to all technicians Minutes to type in the data from one work order 3 54 minutes entering all work orders 1,080 minutes entering all work orders Paper and ink cost $2.70 $54.00 Sharing printouts is losing me 60 minutes a day 1,200 minutes / 20 hours a month In this example, this hybrid method costs the maintenance manager 20 hours of his time per month. This time would be better spent delivering real value to your organization by optimizing maintenance schedules, analyzing past work orders for trends, and streamlining maintenance to deliver better reliability at the same or at a lower cost. How can you cut the cost of data entry? Based on the example above, you can give your 6 technicians an account each on the CMMS. This way they can input data from the work order in real-time as they complete the repairs on terminals at your facility or using their tablet or smartphone. Every day, they work through their list of assigned work orders in their CMMS and sign the work off digitally in the CMMS. For 6 technicians, freeing up 20 hours is an additional $114 per month—surely money well spent. (opens in new tab) (opens in new tab)