Give every intervention a stable identifier
History breaks when records cannot be referenced. A work order number, an incident number and a session record that point at each other give you a chain you can follow years later: which alarm started it, what was replaced, who did the work and what was concluded.
Numbers should be unique per company workspace and never reused, even when a job is cancelled. A reused identifier silently merges two unrelated interventions.
- Incident → work order → maintenance session chain
- Company-scoped, non-reused numbering
- Source recorded on the work order: incident, notification, preventive plan, inspection or engineering analysis
Keep the source, not just the outcome
A closed work order that says "replaced bearing" is a fact without a cause. The same record with the originating alarm code, the incident severity and the diagnostic steps that led to the replacement is engineering evidence.
This matters most in warranty and root-cause discussions, where the question is rarely what was done and usually why it was done.
Attach evidence where the decision happened
Photos, measurements and documents are only useful next to the step they justified. A folder of images from a site visit, separated from the diagnostic step, is close to worthless a year later. Evidence attached to the step it belongs to stays interpretable.
Preserve history when people leave
Deactivating a technician should not delete the work they performed. Records need to stay attributable to a real person who was there, even after their account is closed — otherwise the history is quietly rewritten by staffing changes.
The same principle applies to turbine records: a turbine removed from a site list is not a turbine that never existed.
Make history reviewable, not just storable
The test of an organised history is a question like: "why has this model had three gearbox interventions in two years?" If answering it requires opening fifty documents, the history exists but the organisation does not. Grouping interventions by turbine, model, system, component and alarm code is what turns storage into an answer.