Case studies / Facility Management
Case studyWork orders and service levels for a facility management provider
A Saudi facility management provider tracked every work order against contract service levels as it happened, scheduled technicians across sites and found contracts that were losing money.
Overview
An integrated facility management company in Saudi Arabia providing hard services, cleaning and security to offices, hospitals, shopping malls and residential compounds, run from regional offices in Riyadh, Jeddah and Dammam.
Scale. About 120 client contracts covering more than 900 buildings, a workforce of around 6,500 including 1,400 technicians, and some 30,000 work orders a month, delivered as a phased, multi-location programme.
The challenge
Service-level breaches were found late. Each contract set response and fix times by priority: an air-conditioning failure in a hospital theatre within an hour, a dripping tap in an office within days. Work orders were logged by phone, email and messaging apps into separate helpdesk tools in each region, and completion times were often entered at the end of a shift. Breaches came to light at the monthly review with the client, usually accompanied by a deduction from the invoice.
Workforce scheduling was handled differently in each region. Supervisors allocated technicians from memory and phone calls, so a qualified chiller engineer might be stuck on routine tasks in one building while an urgent job waited across town. Overtime was high in summer, when cooling demand peaks, and some sites were overstaffed in quieter months.
Contract-level margin was unknown. Labour, subcontractors, materials and travel were booked to cost centres by region rather than by contract. The commercial team suspected that some contracts priced aggressively to win had been losing money for years, but could not prove which.
The solution
All requests now enter one helpdesk, whether by phone, email, the client portal or a messaging app. Each work order is classified by priority according to the client's contract and the clock starts immediately. Supervisors see every open job against its response and fix deadlines, with warnings before a breach rather than after.
Technicians are scheduled from one view across sites, trades and shifts. The scheduler suggests the nearest qualified technician for urgent jobs and groups planned maintenance by building and route. Time is recorded against each job from the mobile device, and materials are issued to the work order, not just the site.
Every cost, from labour hours and overtime to materials, subcontractors and vehicles, is booked to a contract. Commercial finance sees margin by contract each month, alongside service-level performance, so the conversation with each client can cover both. Clients see live performance and completed work, with photographs, through their own portal. Shared master data for clients, buildings, assets and staff feeds management reporting.
The engagement
- Eight months
- Six specialists, with operations, helpdesk, workforce planning and commercial finance leads
- Process mapping, work orders and service-level tracking, workforce scheduling, contract-level margin, client portal, shared master data, pilot and phased rollout.
Integrations
- Time and expense capture
- Billing and client portals
- Banks and payments
- Management reporting
How we delivered it
- 01
Map the work and agree measures
Six weeks
We sat with helpdesk agents, supervisors and technicians in all three regions, and joined contract review meetings with clients. At the outset, leadership agreed the measures by which the programme would be judged: service-level compliance by contract, technician utilisation, overtime and margin by contract.
- 02
Design common processes and integrations
Eleven weeks
Operations designed one work order process and priority scheme, mapped to each contract's terms. Technicians would receive and close jobs on mobile devices, with time, materials and photographs captured on site. Finance set rules to book labour, materials and subcontract costs to contracts.
- 03
Pilot in one region
Seven weeks
The Eastern Province office piloted with eight contracts. The pilot found service-level terms that were interpreted differently by client and supervisor, and technicians without the right trade codes. Both were resolved with clients and HR before rollout.
- 04
Roll out in waves and track results
Ten weeks
Riyadh and Jeddah followed. Leadership reviewed the agreed measures monthly.
Results
- Response times improved
- Service levels tracked live for every work order
- Loss-making contracts found and renegotiated
- Teams worked from the same data across three regions
Response times improved. With breaches flagged before they happened, supervisors redirected technicians in time, and service-level deductions at monthly reviews fell sharply. Clients value the portal; several now use it in their own internal reporting.
Scheduling across sites reduced idle time and overtime, particularly during the summer peak, and gave specialist engineers more time on specialist work.
Margin by contract confirmed the commercial team's suspicion: a handful of contracts, mostly large retail and residential sites won several years earlier, were losing money once all costs were counted. The company renegotiated scope or price on most of them at renewal and exited one. Because the measures had been agreed at the start, leadership could recognise progress clearly every month.
We used to discover a breach when the client showed us the invoice deduction. Now we see it coming, and we can see which contracts are actually worth having.
What made the difference
The provider found loss-making contracts and renegotiated. Agreeing measures at the start made success easy to recognise.
