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Solution · Operations & qualityFacility and office requests routed, timed and reported instead of remembered
One front door for every request the building generates
Every facility and office request is raised once in Teams, routed by rule to the right team or provider with a response time, tracked to closure and reported by site.
Executive summary
Broken air conditioning, a badge, a desk move: all of it lands on one office manager's memory.
The front door is deliberately small.
A request takes a minute to raise and arrives complete, so the provider is dispatched on the first contact instead of the third.
the provider portals; the providers' mailboxes; the site teams' Teams channels
Business problem
Facilities & administration
Buildings generate work whether or not anyone designed a process for it. Lights fail, a chiller trips on the first warm week, a starter needs a badge and a desk, a meeting needs coffee for twelve. None of it is complicated and none of it is optional. What is missing is a place to put the request, so it lands on whoever is nearest the problem.
Three people pay for that. The requester pays in uncertainty: nothing confirms the email, so they ask again, and the second ask costs as much as the first. The office manager pays in interruption, holding a dozen commitments in a notebook alongside a job meant to be something else. The provider pays too, because "the air conditioning is broken again", with no site and no access time, becomes two phone calls before anyone is dispatched.
At eleven locations this stops being administrative and becomes commercial. Every site has its own routine, so nothing is comparable: nobody can say which building consumes the most reactive work, or whether the cleaning contract is being delivered. Response times were negotiated into the contracts and never tested, because a contracted four hours means nothing when nobody recorded the hour the fault was reported.
How it works today
Most companies with more than a couple of buildings run some version of this.
- PersonAn employee emails the office mailbox, messages the office manager in Teams or stops them in the corridor
- PersonThe office manager decides who owns it, an internal team, the landlord or a provider, then writes or calls
- WaitingNothing acknowledges the request, so a second person reports the same fault two or three days later
- SystemTwo providers accept work only in their own portal, so the description is retyped and the reference kept in a spreadsheet
- Risk of errorContracted response times go unchecked, because the hour a fault was reported exists only in a sent-items folder
- PersonOpen items are chased when somebody complains, from a notebook or a file on one laptop
- Risk of errorProvider invoices are approved on trust, and the spend cannot be attributed to a site or a request
Why the current process costs more than it appears
Behind every exception is an hour nobody logged.
- Coordination is the invisible part of the bill. A five-minute fix is preceded by an email, a decision about who owns it, a call, a chase and a closing message, none of it recorded.
- Duplicate reports arrive because nothing acknowledges the first, so providers are called twice for one fault and occasionally paid twice.
- Response times bought at renewal are unenforceable without a timestamp. A four-hour commitment nobody measures is a service level never claimed.
- Repeat faults hide in plain sight. One air-conditioning unit failing four times in a summer looks like four small jobs, not the replacement decision it is.
- Everything depends on one person per site. When the office manager takes two weeks off, requests do not stop and the notebook stays in the drawer.
Cost of inaction
What the rows cannot price is the argument nobody wins. A chiller fails for the third time in one summer, the provider says it was reported late, and the company has a notebook while the provider has a system; the credit is never claimed. The same gap shows in the budget round, where reactive spend is defended with last year's total.
Meanwhile the arrangement holds because nine office managers make it hold. That is a quiet dependency until two of them leave in the same quarter and every commitment in their heads has to be rediscovered from a mailbox. Behind it a maintenance history never accumulates, so replacement decisions start from opinion.
A plausible organisation with realistic proportions. The figures are there to be recalculated on your data; they are not a client result.
A European services and distribution group: 1,400 employees across nine offices and two warehouses in four countries, Microsoft 365 E3, no facility management system. Maintenance, cleaning, security, catering and waste come from a dozen providers, and a group facilities manager oversees nine office managers who do this alongside another job.
Around 900 facility and office-administration requests a month across the eleven locations: roughly 60% small building faults, 25% office administration such as badges, desk moves and catering, 15% items belonging to the landlord.
Requests arrive by email, Teams message and conversation. Each office manager keeps a private list, contacts providers by email or portal, and chases when somebody complains. Invoices are approved with no request behind them.
About 13 minutes of coordination per request across intake, deciding who owns it, retyping into a portal, chasing and closing. Nothing is timestamped, so response times go unenforced and cost per site is reconstructed once a year.
One request form in Microsoft Teams with a short catalogue; a routing table sending each category at each site to the responsible team or provider with the agreed response time; work orders by email, or by robot where the provider offers only a portal; visible status; escalation before a breach; a monthly report of volume and cost per site.
Coordination falls to the exceptions, requests reach providers complete on the first contact, a missed response time surfaces while there is still time to act, and cost per site comes from the requests rather than the ledger. All of it modelled, not observed at a client.
Proposed solution
The front door is deliberately small. A canvas app in Power Apps sits as a tab in Microsoft Teams and on a phone, which matters in a warehouse where nobody carries a laptop. It offers a short catalogue rather than a free-text box: a category, the site, the room, a photograph. Each submission becomes a row in a Microsoft Lists register with a reference that every later message, work order and invoice line points back to.
Routing is a table, not a judgement. Each combination of category and site names the responsible party, the response time from the contract, and the escalation contact. Power Automate reads that table, stamps the target time on the request and hands the work over: internal jobs become an Adaptive Card in the site team's Teams channel, external jobs a work-order email carrying the address, access instructions and reference. Where a provider accepts work only in its own portal, a UiPath robot raises the ticket and writes the provider's reference back, and that robot is the only part needing anything beyond Microsoft 365.
The clock turns a mailbox into a service. Reminders go out before the target time rather than after it, and a request still open at the target escalates to the site contact, then to the group facilities manager. The requester watches one card that updates itself. On closure the invoiced amount and the provider's reference are recorded, and a Power BI report reads the register each month: volume and cost by site and category, response-time compliance by provider, repeat faults by room. None of it needs a facility management platform.
Power Apps canvas app as a Microsoft Teams tab; Microsoft Lists as the register; Power Automate flows with Adaptive Cards, reminders and approvals in Teams; Microsoft Forms for the closing confirmation; a Power BI report in a Teams tab; UiPath Orchestrator queues, triggers, credential store and audit log
The request catalogue, the routing and response-time table, the register and its status model, work-order templates per provider, the escalation clock, the status card, the two portal robots, the monthly report and the office managers' runbook
UiPath Robots on the two provider portals that offer no interface, fed from the register through the UiPath Integration Service connector for Microsoft OneDrive & SharePoint
How the automated process works
- PersonThe requester opens the facility requests tab in Teams or on a phone, picks a category, confirms site and room and adds a photograph
- AutomationThe request lands in the register with a reference, and the routing table sets the responsible party, the target time and the escalation contact
- AutomationInternal work becomes an Adaptive Card in the site team's channel; external work a work-order email with address, access and on-site contact
- SystemFor providers who accept only their own portal, a robot raises the ticket and writes the reference back
- AutomationThe requester gets one status card showing who holds the request and when it is due, updated at every change
- AutomationA reminder goes out before the target; a request still open at the target escalates to the site contact, then to the facilities manager
- PersonThe coordinator handles what no rule covers: an unusual request, a landlord dispute, a quote needing approval
- AutomationOn closure the requester confirms in two questions, the invoice reference and amount are recorded, and the report refreshes
Human-in-the-loop model
Automation handles
- Intake, the reference, and the routing that names the responsible party and the response time
- Work orders by email or portal, carrying the site details a provider would otherwise phone for
- Reminders before the target, escalation after it, and the status card the requester watches
- Closure, the cost recorded against the request, and the monthly volume and cost report
People decide
- What belongs to the landlord and what the company pays for
- Quotes above the site limit, and whether a repeating fault becomes a replacement
- Priority when two requests compete for the same provider on the same day
- The routing table itself: which category, at which site, goes to whom and how fast
Before and after
Systems and integrations
The stack is deliberately short: one engine, one execution layer, one place where a person decides.
Inputs
- the request form in the Teams tab
- the same form on a phone in the warehouses
- email forwarded from the office mailboxes
- the routing table of sites, categories and providers
Automation layer
- Power Automate cloud flows
- Microsoft Lists
- UiPath Orchestrator queues and triggers
- UiPath Robots
Target systems
- the provider portals
- the providers' mailboxes
- the site teams' Teams channels
- the SharePoint evidence library
Human touchpoints: the request form; the status card; the site team's work card; the escalation card; the monthly report in Teams
Technologies used
the request catalogue as a canvas app in a Teams tab and on the phone
Athe register: one row per request with site, category, provider, target time and cost
Arouting rules, the response-time clock, reminders, escalation and approvals
Awhere requests are raised, status appears and escalations land, through Adaptive Cards
Athe two-question closing confirmation, answered without leaving Teams
Atickets in the provider portals with no interface, queued, retried and audited
Apicks up register rows needing a portal work order
Athe monthly volume, response-time and cost report by site and category
AIllustrative economic model
Numbers you can check against your own data.
Ask nine office managers how long a request takes and you get nine answers; thirteen minutes is the middle of the range we meet, covering intake, deciding who owns it, retyping into a portal, a chase or two and the closing message. €24 is a fully loaded hourly cost for office administration in Central Europe. The repair itself sits outside this arithmetic, and none of the inputs was measured at a client.
Run the numbers on your data
An illustrative estimate from your own inputs. It models released capacity; it is not a promise of savings.
Business benefits
- A request takes a minute to raise and arrives complete, so the provider is dispatched on the first contact instead of the third
- Requesters stop chasing, because the status card answers what the second email was going to ask
- Contracted response times become measurable, and therefore negotiable at renewal
- Repeat faults surface as a pattern by room, unit or site, turning four small repairs into one replacement decision
- Office managers get their week back, and cover for each other from the same register
- Spend attaches to a site, a category and a request, so next year's budget is built from what happened rather than last year plus a percentage
The management view
- Eleven locations report the same way, so buildings can be compared on cost, volume and provider performance instead of anecdotes
- Renewals are prepared from response-time evidence rather than from the last complaint anyone remembers
- The process survives absence and turnover, because it lives in a register rather than nine notebooks
- Growth stops adding coordinators: a tenth office joins by adding rows to the routing table
Board-level KPIs
Security and governance
The automation holds exactly the rights it needs, and not one more.
- Flows and robots run under their own service identities, whose rights stop at the register, the work-order mailbox and the two portals
- Portal passwords live in the Orchestrator credential store, which can be backed by Azure Key Vault, and never appear in a flow
- A workplace photograph can contain people, so the catalogue asks for the fault, and images sit in SharePoint under your retention policy
- The register keeps who raised what, when it was routed, when the provider was told and when it closed, the record the contract review and the invoice check both need
- Requests and evidence stay in your Microsoft 365 tenant, and the robot layer runs in the UiPath Automation Cloud EU region
Why now
Hybrid working changed what a building is asked to do: fewer fixed desks, more bookable rooms, more moves, and a request pattern nobody has data on
The front door runs on Microsoft 365 licences most companies already pay for, and the only specialist part is a robot for providers who insist on their portal
Coordination worth a modelled €4,680 a month is spent whether or not it appears as a budget line, and it grows with every site rather than with the business
Relevant executive roles
Eleven buildings report in one language, so site and provider performance can be compared rather than described
Facilities spend attaches to a site, a category and a request before the invoice is approved
Contracted response times become evidence rather than intention, and renewals start from the register
A starter's badge, desk and access stop depending on whether one person remembered
Common questions and objections
This is not one. It is a form, a list, a routing table and a report on licences you already hold, and it earns its place as soon as requests are spread across more than one or two people.
Some will, and the design accepts it: a forwarded email becomes a request raised in two clicks. The old mailbox closes site by site, not everywhere at once.
They do not have to. Providers who take email get a better email, with the site, access and reference they were about to phone for; the two who insist on a portal get their tickets from a robot.
When this is not the right solution
- A single building with one office manager and a few providers, where a shared mailbox and a checklist cost less than a flow
- No agreement on who owns what: if the split between landlord, internal team and provider is unsettled, that negotiation comes first, because the routing table encodes it
- A facility management platform people actually use, where the work is intake and reporting around it, not a second register beside it
A question for the next management meeting
Across our eleven locations, what did we spend on building and office services last month, and how much of it can be traced back to a request somebody raised?
Implementation approach
A scope without ambiguity, before anything is signed.
We deliver
- The request catalogue: the categories worth having and what belongs to IT or HR instead
- The routing and response-time table by category and site, agreed with the providers who must meet it
- The register, its status model and reference scheme, with photographs in SharePoint
- The escalation clock, the status card and the site team's work card in Teams
- Work-order templates per provider, and robots for the portals that accept nothing else
- The monthly Power BI report of volume, response-time compliance and cost by site
- A pilot at one office and one warehouse, then rollout site by site
We need from you
- Your provider list, with the response time and scope each contract actually promises
- Three months of whatever each site keeps, so the catalogue matches reality
- A named owner per site and the escalation contact above them
- Accounts for the two provider portals and a service identity in your tenant
Stages
Discovery
Categories, sites, providers, response times and who owns what today
Design
The catalogue, the routing table, the status model and the escalation path
Build
The form, the register, the flows, the Teams cards and the portal robots
Pilot
One office and one warehouse in production, old routes open beside them
Rollout
Site by site, closing the old mailbox route behind each
Optimisation
Rule tuning, catalogue changes and the first provider review on real data
Quick win. Effort comes from the number of providers and how differently each wants to receive work, not from the technology; three providers on one response-time standard start faster than a dozen contracts written by different hands.
If the roof leaks tonight, the route to a contractor is a number in somebody's notebook.
Send us your provider list with the response times each contract promises, plus one month of whatever your sites keep. We come back with a request catalogue, a routing table and the breaches already sitting inside that month.
Sort one month of facility requestsThe neighbouring process usually has the same problem
Stop releasing work orders by printer and typing the completion reports back a week later.
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