A facility management platform that replaced spreadsheets and phone calls

The client is a company that operates and maintains several buildings and facilities, with a mix of in-house staff and outside vendors. Each building has its own spaces, occupants, recurring inspections and running costs. A small operations team coordinates all of it.

The company had grown building by building. Each new site brought its own way of working, its own spreadsheet and its own group of contacts. By the time they came to us, the operations team knew the work was getting done, but could not easily prove it or see it as a whole.

An occupant reported a problem by phone or message to whoever they knew. That person told the operations team, who added a line to a spreadsheet for that building, if they remembered. A vendor was called and the job was agreed by phone. Photos of the finished work stayed on the vendor's phone or in a chat group.

Inspections lived on a separate calendar. Expenses were typed into another spreadsheet when invoices arrived. At month end, a manager combined the sheets by hand to report on each building. Each step worked on its own, but nothing connected them.

Once the current modules are complete, we would extend the platform into planned maintenance and budgets, so managers can compare actual costs with plans for each building. We would also add automated approval steps for larger expenses, so spending above a set limit waits for a manager before it goes ahead.

We would add AI later, and only where it helps: reading vendor invoices into expense records and sorting incoming requests by category and urgency. Those match our data entry automation and workflow approvals solutions, and they make sense once the core data is complete and trusted.