How do you organize facilities requests so they don't get lost?

Move the most common requests to facilities into a service catalog on the employee portal, and make location the first field on every form: office, floor, room. Start with the 10–15 most frequent requests, and set up emergencies as separate services from day one.

Which facilities services to put in the catalog first

Export the last two months of requests from email and team chats and group them by reason. The most frequent ones go into the catalog first. These are usually:

• a visitor badge for a guest;
• booking a meeting room or a parking space;
• calling a technician and minor repairs;
• ordering office supplies, water, and cleaning supplies;
• moving a workstation;
• courier service and corporate car service;
• preparing a workstation for a new hire.

Name the service in the employee's words, for example "Air conditioning isn't working": the employee won't find "HVAC system maintenance" in the catalog. And agree on boundary services in advance: visitor badges are often shared between facilities and security, while printer cartridges and printers usually stay with IT. Otherwise requests get passed from department to department.

How to describe a service

• Form. The key field is location: without it, the technician has to call the requester first. The employee picks what happened from a list, such as "leaking," "won't turn on," or "no power," and adds details in a free-text field. Orders need a quantity and a date they're needed by.
• Assignee. The request goes straight to a group: building maintenance, supplies, or transportation. Work by external contractors, such as cleaning or elevator maintenance, is managed by a designated facilities employee.
• Approval. Only where it's required: nonstandard furniture is approved by the department head, a contractor badge by security. Water and office supplies need no approval.
• Due date. Split planned requests and emergencies into different services with different due dates. Make a leak or a power outage a separate service with the shortest due date, so an emergency doesn't wait in line behind office supplies.

The form collects everything the assignee needs so they don't have to ask follow-up questions. For a courier delivery, for example, that means the document or package, the sender and recipient, the address, and the delivery time.

Where to start

• Launch the catalog with the most common services and tell employees that facilities requests are now accepted through the portal.
• After a month, look at the statistics: which requests are most frequent, where due dates are missed, and which group is short-staffed. These numbers will help when you need to justify the department's headcount or budget.
• Add the remaining services based on the results of the first month.

Facilities is often one of the first departments to join after IT. At ITG Corporation, accounting and facilities joined the platform in 2021, after the IT department had automated its own processes. How to choose the first department for the portal is covered in the answer on which department to start with when the service approach goes beyond IT.

How it works in SimpleOne ESM

SimpleOne ESM is a set of SimpleOne platform tools for managing internal services (enterprise service management, ESM). Facilities is a service provider in it, with its own catalog on the shared employee portal:

• the request form is set for each service on its service catalog card;
• approvals are configured separately, where they're needed;
• tasks are assigned to staff automatically based on workload;
• due dates are set in service level agreements (SLAs), and indicators warn in advance about a possible breach.

If the company uses the SimpleOne ITSM IT service management system, the employee orders a facilities service on the same portal where they submit IT requests and sees the status of all their requests there.

Whether to automate facilities requests with a separate system for the department or with a company-wide portal is covered in the answer on facilities request software: a standalone system or a shared portal.