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How to Avoid Duplicate Work Requests

Natural Language Processing Automatically Calls Out Duplicate Work Requests

Ty Houy avatar
Written by Ty Houy
Updated over a week ago

Overview

Limble uses natural language processing and machine learning to warn work requesters of potential duplicate submissions, reducing the number of duplicate work requests your maintenance team receives.

Enterprise customers can enable this feature to catch similar work requests.

This article explains how to adjust the feature’s settings.

Table of Contents

How it Works

When someone selects the submit button on a work request, Limble analyzes all existing open work orders on the appropriate assets. If Limble sees that there are work orders that may be referring to the same issue, Limble will give them the choice of submitting the problem anyway or canceling their request.

For example, someone fills out the work request form indicating that the faucet in the warehouse is leaking and then hits "Submit."

Limble detects that a work request has already been submitted. In this example, someone already wrote: “faucet is leaking.” Limble then displays the alert below.

Clicking on that alert will open that work request for them to review. Here the user can decide what they want to do based on the details of the work request.

  • If the work request is about the same thing they wanted to report, they can add a comment for the maintenance team. Adding a comment will add them to the notification chain so they can stay up to date on the progress of that request.

  • If the work request they see is unrelated to the one they want to submit, they can simply exit the current one and click "Submit Anyway" to submit their work request.

This will then submit the request as usual.

Adjusting Sensitivity

Under Settings > Configuration > Work Request Settings, you can adjust how many phrases need to be similar before a warning is shown to the work requester. You can also disable the feature entirely.

(Note: only Super Users can access this page and adjust the settings.)

A phrase is a combination of two or more words that express a single idea but do not form a complete sentence, for example, “water spill” or “machine down”.

The more phrases you select to compare, the more specific this feature will be. For example, selecting “1 Phrase” will cause Limble to flag more work requests but with a higher chance of them not being real duplicates, while selecting “5 Phrases” will have the opposite effect and will flag fewer submissions but with a greater likelihood of warning about a legitimate duplicate request.

Filtering Duplicates by Groups of Assets

Now you may wonder, how do you only have the duplicate detection work on an individual asset and its sub-assets? For example, you may have multiple buildings but only want to check for duplicate work requests for one building. You may not want a report of a broken HVAC unit in one building to check for the same request in another building. You can refine how the detection systems work by grouping your assets in a hierarchy.

Let’s use the example of two separate buildings on your job site. You have a Warehouse and a Shop. Each of these has different floors, and each floor has an HVAC unit.

If the person in the Shop submits a work request because the HVAC on the first floor is not working, you do not want duplicate detection to trigger the work request that was made earlier that day for the Warehouse's Second Floor HVAC.

To do this, open the top most level asset where you want the duplicate detection to work, in this case, Shop, and then click the gear icon to access the settings.

Then you check the "Checking Similar Work Requests" box.

When a work request is submitted for the Shop’s First Floor HVAC, the duplicate detection will look only at the Shop asset and its child assets to see if there are any duplicates. If a work request is submitted for the Warehouse’s Second Floor HVAC, the duplicate detection will look only at the Warehouse.

To ensure the Warehouse (and any other buildings your facility might have) only trigger duplicate detection, you would also check the Checking Similar Work Requests checkbox for the ‘Warehouse.’

You can subdivide even further from here. Let's say you do not want work requests for the First Floor HVAC to look at work requests for the Second Floor HVAC. You could further divide your Building by floors like this:

To achieve this, check each floor's "Checking Similar Work Requests" checkbox.

(Note: duplicate work request detection will always look into all of its child assets regardless of grouping, so a request made for ‘Warehouse’ will look for duplicate requests in ‘Warehouse First Floor,’ ‘HVAC 1.1’, Warehouse Second Floor, HVAC 1.2, even though Warehouse First and Second Floor are split off from each other for the purpose of Duplicate detection.)

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Still don’t see what you’re looking for? Check out our YouTube channel for more tips and tricks! You can also reach out to us anytime at support@limblecmms.com.

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