Work Order Domain

Overview#

A water utility's SCADA system flags a pressure drop on a main feeder pipe at 6:48 a.m. The operations centre raises an emergency work order in under a minute, assigns the nearest crew, and tracks their progress from dispatch through on-site arrival to completion. Every status transition is timestamped, GPS-tagged, and attributed to the individual who made it. The customer service team can see restoration progress in real time. That end-to-end, fully auditable field operation lifecycle is what the Work Order domain provides.

The domain manages the complete lifecycle of utility work orders from creation through completion. It supports six order types across six utility sectors, with crew assignment, location tracking, scheduling, materials usage, labour hours tracking, and a full status history audit trail that records every state transition with user attribution. All work order data is stored in PostgreSQL with multi-tenant organisation isolation.

Key Features#

• Multiple Work Order Types: Create emergency, planned, preventive, corrective, construction, and inspection work orders to cover the full range of utility field operations.

• Multi-Utility Support: Manage work orders across electric, water, gas, sewer, telecom, and waste utility types within a unified system.

• Lifecycle Management: Track work orders through nine status stages (created, assigned, dispatched, en route, on site, in progress, pending review, completed, cancelled) with automatic timestamp recording at each transition.

• Priority Management: Classify work orders by five priority levels (critical, high, medium, low, routine) with priority-based query ordering to surface the most urgent work first.

• Status History Audit Trail: Record every status transition as an immutable history entry with the user who made the change, timestamp, GPS coordinates, and optional notes for complete accountability.

• Crew Assignment and Scheduling: Assign crews to work orders with scheduling support including estimated duration, scheduled start and end times, and due dates.

• Materials and Labour Tracking: Record materials used and labour hours for each work order to support job costing, inventory management, and operational analysis.

• Cross-Domain Linking: Link work orders to incidents, outages, infrastructure assets, service territories, customers, and parent work orders for comprehensive context.

• Dispatch Integration: Support intelligent dispatch with required skills tracking, critical facility flagging, life-support customer identification, and approval workflows.

• Dashboard Statistics: View work order counts by status for operational oversight and workload management.

Work Order Types#

Mermaid Diagram#

Use Cases#

• Electric Utilities: Create and dispatch emergency work orders with critical priority, tracking crew progress from dispatch through arrival and completion with GPS-attributed status transitions for regulatory reporting.

• Water & Gas Utilities: Schedule and manage routine preventive maintenance work orders with materials planning and labour hour tracking to control costs and meet regulatory inspection obligations.

• Outage Restoration: Link work orders to outage records and customer impacts to coordinate restoration efforts across multiple crews with full status tracking visible to the operations centre and customers.

• Asset Management: Use dashboard statistics and status history to report on work order throughput, response times, and completion rates for SLA compliance and capital programme management.

Integration#

The Work Order domain connects with utility operations across the platform:

• Utility Infrastructure: Work orders reference specific infrastructure assets.
• Customer Management: Customer accounts provide context for field work.
• Outage Management: Work orders link to outage events for restoration tracking.
• SLA Tracking: Work order timestamps feed into SLA compliance monitoring.
• Utility Inventory: Material usage records connect to the parts catalog.
• Service Territory: Work orders route to crews based on territory assignments.

Open Standards#

• GraphQL (June 2018 specification): All work order queries, mutations, and workflow operations are exposed through a Strawberry-based GraphQL schema with strongly typed inputs, enums, and cursor-based connection pagination.
• ISO 8601: Every lifecycle timestamp on a work order (assigned, dispatched, arrived, started, completed) and every status history entry is serialised in ISO 8601 extended format via Python's .isoformat().
• RFC 7519 / JWT with RS256: API access to the Work Order domain is gated by RS256 JSON Web Token verification against a JWKS endpoint, enforcing the platform's OAuth 2.0-based authorisation model.
• RFC 4122 (UUID version 4): All primary keys for work orders, workflow instances, execution audit events, evidence records, and annotation objects are generated as version 4 UUIDs.
• FIPS 180-4 / SHA-256: The execution audit event log uses SHA-256 hash chaining to produce a tamper-evident chain of events, and each evidence upload carries a checksum_sha256 field for file integrity verification.
• GeoJSON (RFC 7946): Work order location, GPS-attributed status history entries, and workflow map annotations (pin, polygon, hazard, isolation markers) are represented using WGS 84 decimal degree coordinates consistent with the GeoJSON geometry object structure.
• IEC 61968-9 (CIM Work Management): The domain's work order lifecycle, utility type taxonomy (electric, water, gas, sewer, telecom, waste), asset referencing, crew assignment, and permit-to-work gates align with the IEC Common Information Model Work Management information model used in utility enterprise systems.

Last Reviewed: 2026-02-24 Last Updated: 2026-04-14