Facilities request software: a standalone system or a company-wide portal?

A company-wide portal, if IT, HR, and accounting already use it or will: many facilities services involve these departments. A standalone system makes sense when the department's main job is maintaining the building and its engineering systems, and employee requests are few. How to describe facilities services before choosing a system is covered in the answer on organizing facilities requests so they don't get lost.

What the options are

• A shared inbox and a spreadsheet. There's almost nothing to set up, but only the person who sorts the inbox knows the due date and the assignee, and workload reports are compiled by hand.
• A task tracker with a project for facilities. Requests become tasks, but there is no service catalog for employees: the requester writes in free form, and a facilities employee copies emails into the tracker.
• An intranet or a CRM with a module for facilities requests. Requests are handled where employees already work, but the facilities catalog, due dates, and reports are configured separately from IT.
• A building maintenance system. It tracks equipment, planned maintenance, and technicians, and it's strong where engineering systems are the main focus. Requests for a visitor badge or a meeting room are secondary there, and the employee gets one more place to go.
• A shared service portal for all departments: enterprise service management (ESM) platforms, such as SimpleOne ESM. Facilities, IT, HR, and accounting take requests through one portal, and each department has its own catalog, assignees, and due dates.

This is how ITG Corporation organized its internal services: one service hub, Production Unit, covers infrastructure, IT services, workplaces, automation, and facilities.

How the options differ for facilities

• Services that span departments. A workstation for a new hire is prepared by facilities, IT, and HR, and some facilities services have a second participant from another department. Which services these are is covered in the answer on organizing facilities requests. When each department has its own system, the employee has to guess where to write, and requests get forwarded from system to system. On a shared portal, the employee picks a service, not a department.
• Branch offices and the shared services center. Large companies often move facilities functions into a shared services center (SSC) together with accounting and HR, while regional offices have their own building engineers. A standalone system for one department then remains one more entry point inside the SSC. On a shared portal, requests from all offices and all of the center's functions arrive in one place.
• Reports and the employee directory. A standalone system needs its own user accounts, its own employee directory, and reports that can't be compared with other departments. What else to check when choosing is covered in the answer on choosing a system for requests to non-IT departments.

How it works in SimpleOne ESM

SimpleOne ESM is a set of SimpleOne platform tools for managing internal services. Facilities is a service provider in it, with its own catalog:

• the employee orders services from all departments on one portal;
• the org structure and employee directory are shared by all departments, so a new department doesn't have to set them up again;
• tasks are distributed among facilities groups automatically based on workload;
• due dates are set in service level agreements (SLAs), and indicators warn in advance about a possible breach;
• the department head sees the department's metrics on traffic-light scorecards next to other departments.

Facilities services are configured by an integration partner or by the company's own team. If the company already uses the SimpleOne ITSM IT service management system, facilities joins the same portal where employees submit IT requests. Learn more in the answer on connecting accounting and facilities to an ITSM system.

See how department services look on the portal on the SimpleOne ESM page.