Maintenance Work Request System: Kill the Radio Calls and Sticky Notes

The problem this kills

On the floor, a machine goes down and the report happens over a two-way radio, a hand-scrawled sticky note, or a shout across the line. Maybe maintenance hears it, maybe they don't. Two operators report the same jam twice. Nobody writes down when it broke and when it came back, so when management asks "how much downtime did we have on Line 3 last month?" the honest answer is a shrug.

The fixes get lost, the urgent stuff competes with the trivial stuff for attention, and there's no history tied to the machine — so you keep re-learning the same recurring failure. None of this is a people problem. It's a missing system, and you do not need to be a developer to build it.

What you'll build

A simple internal web tool. An operator picks the machine from your asset list, describes the problem, sets the urgency, flags it if it's a safety issue, snaps a photo, and submits. The request lands in a maintenance planner's queue — not as an active job yet. The planner triages it: sets the priority, picks a technician, and schedules a date. Only when the planner approves does it become a real work order. The assigned technician updates progress and closes it out with repair notes and the actual downtime. The operator who reported it gets an automatic email when the status changes. And anyone can pull a clean work-order history CSV for any machine or any date range.

A built-in duplicate guard stops the same active issue on the same machine from being reported twice, so the planner isn't drowning in dupes.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

The downloadable plan is a step-by-step file you paste into an AI coding agent. It opens by interviewing you about your operation — how breakdowns get reported today and who does it, what your machines and asset codes actually look like, what urgency levels and safety rules you use, your typical and peak request volume, exactly who is allowed to approve a work order, and the messy edge cases like third-shift reports or a machine that's down for a reason that isn't really maintenance's job. Then it tailors the data model, the urgency scale, and every later step to your answers. This is not a generic template; the agent reads a short spec back to you and waits for your thumbs-up before it builds anything. From there it walks the agent through the asset list, the operator report form with photo upload, the planner triage-and-approve screen, the technician close-out with downtime, the status emails, and the CSV export — each step with a ready-to-copy prompt. There's also a fallback so you can build the whole thing today even with no link to your existing maintenance or ERP system.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

• Login so only your team can report, triage, or close work — not the whole internet.
• Row-level security so each plant or organization sees only its own machines and work orders.
• A full audit trail — who reported it, who approved it, who closed it, and exactly when.
• A human-in-the-loop approval gate — a request never becomes an active work order until a maintenance planner reviews and approves it. The system drafts, a person commits.
• A duplicate guard — one active request per problem per machine, so the same breakdown can't clog the queue twice.

Who it's for

Operators who need a faster, simpler way to report problems than a radio. Maintenance planners who need one clean queue to triage instead of a pile of notes. Technicians who need to know what's assigned to them and capture the fix. And plant managers who finally want real downtime numbers tied to each machine.

You've got this — paste the first prompt and let the agent interview you.