Need advice on work-order software.

May 17, 2012 10:29 AM

My very small office is looking for Windows software suggestions for tracking work orders. I know nothing about this kind of software, only that someone suggested BMC (Numara) Track-It. Are there others you have used that you can suggest to me?

Thank you for your help, as always.

posted by 4ster to computers & internet (6 answers total)

well, kinda need a bit more info to go on. What are you tracking ? Progress ? Payment ? Time/dates ?

And work-orders that users generate, or are part of a invoice scheme, or __ ?
posted by k5.user at 11:21 AM on May 17, 2012

Agree that more info is needed for appropriate suggestions. I think that for whatever you want, there are friendlier and more lightweight options than Numara Track-It.
posted by sarahnicolesays at 12:42 PM on May 17, 2012

What kind of work will these work-orders be used to track? There are some good work-order solutions out there...but much of it is tailored to specific types of work (eg. IT Helpdesk, Maintenance, Customer Service, Hotels, etc)
posted by samsara at 1:59 PM on May 17, 2012

I would steer clear of Track-It. Years of experience with it and it is a bit ungainly to manage.

Does it have to be Windows-specific? There are a lot of great online options available now. Take a look at FreshDesk or Desk. No software to install and available everything.
posted by purephase at 5:18 AM on May 18, 2012

Assuming that you're talking about work orders assigned to individuals internal to your company (or even internally really), something like Bilt might meet your needs. It's extremely flexible and can represent practically any structure you can think of.

I work on a custom work management system at my day job, but I use Bilt for outside work. It's web based, written in PHP so not really Windows specific.

You could also try something like Mantis perhaps. It's much less easy to customize, however.

If you really want a Windows based app, I used IssueView at a previous employer because we didn't have any budget or servers available and were desperate to use something other than the IBM mainframe to track tasks on a smallish team. It's very slick, also extremely easy to customize. I believe you can use a MDB file on a Windows share or a SQL Server database to share data between multiple copies, no web server required.

And this is all assuming you use the term "work order" the same way my companies have. If that's not that case, hopefully someone else finds these useful.
posted by airways at 11:36 AM on May 18, 2012

oops, I meant (or even external really)^
posted by airways at 11:36 AM on May 18, 2012