Cut vendor follow-ups
Cut vendor follow-ups. The agent gathers quotes, confirms attendance and tracks each job to completion.
Most of a coordinator's day with vendors is spent asking: for a quote, for an arrival time, for a photo, for the invoice. The vendor coordination agent does that asking for you. It sends each job to the vendor on the channel they already use, reads their replies, chases when they go quiet and keeps every step on the work order, so your team stops spending the day on follow-up calls.
These five short videos follow one week at Acme Facilities, a fictional organisation running several sites with a mix of contractors. Each one shows a single part of the job, from the first quote to the closed work order, and where a person still makes the call: approving spend, settling a dispute or picking up a job the agent can't move on its own.
Gets quotes in before work starts
A chiller fault at Riverside Tower needs a quote before anyone can approve the repair, and that's where the waiting starts. Someone emails the vendor, waits, gets pulled onto something else, then emails again days later. The quote finally turns up in one person's inbox, so nobody else on the team knows whether it has arrived or what it says. Meanwhile the chiller is still tripping and the building manager keeps asking when someone will come. Multiply that by every job across every site that needs a quote, and a coordinator's week disappears into asking, remembering and asking again.
In this demo
0:00 This is work order #1182 at Riverside Tower: chiller 2 is tripping on high pressure. Acme Facilities' rules say any chiller repair needs a quote first, so the agent starts there rather than sending someone straight out.
0:17 It picks the contracted HVAC vendor for this site, Northline Mechanical, and checks how they like to be contacted. For Northline, that's WhatsApp.
0:34 Here's the message it sends: the site, the asset, the fault as reported and a clear ask for a quote by 4 PM tomorrow. The vendor doesn't need a login or an app to reply.
0:52 The work order now shows the job as waiting on a quote, so anyone on the team can see where it stands without asking the coordinator.
1:08 4 PM passes with no reply. The agent sends one reminder, as the rule says, and Northline's office answers within the hour with a PDF quote for $3,850.
1:21 The quote is attached to the work order. It's above the $2,000 limit Acme set for this site, so the agent doesn't tell Northline to go ahead.
1:32 Instead, it sends the quote to Dana, the facilities manager, with the work order and the quote together. Dana approves it from her phone.
1:50 Only then does the agent confirm the go-ahead with Northline. The spending decision stays with the person who owns it, and the asking and reminding are off the coordinator's list.
A coordinator emails each vendor for a quote and keeps a mental list of who still owes one.
The agent asks for every quote, chases the late ones and puts anything over your limit in front of the person who approves it.
Confirms who is coming and when
Once a job is approved, the next question is simple: has the vendor accepted it, and when will they arrive? Without an answer, the site team phones the vendor's office, waits on hold and passes a vague time on to the store manager. If the vendor quietly declines or forgets, nobody finds out until the requester calls back to complain. The coordinator ends up as a switchboard between the site and the vendor, while the work order says nothing about what is actually happening. For a high-priority fault like a rooftop unit that isn't cooling, that uncertainty is the part people remember.
In this demo
0:00 Work order #1204: AHU-3 on the roof at Elm Street Retail Park isn't cooling. It's high priority, and the agent sends it to Northline Mechanical on WhatsApp with Accept and Decline buttons.
0:15 The message carries what the technician needs to decide: the site, the asset, the priority and the fault. Marco, Northline's technician, can answer with one tap.
0:29 Marco accepts and says he'll be there around 2:30. The agent reads the arrival time from his reply and adds it to the work order timeline, next to the acceptance.
0:47 On the left is the conversation, on the right the work order. Every message from the vendor lines up with a row on the timeline, so the record builds itself while the job happens.
1:04 At 2:18 Marco shares his location from site. The agent checks it against the store's address, logs that he's on site, and the work order moves to in progress.
1:22 Not every vendor says yes. When one declines, the agent hands the job back to the coordinator to reassign, with the reason the vendor gave.
1:35 For the site team, the question of whether anyone is coming has an answer on the work order, and nobody had to pick up the phone.
The site team phones the vendor's office to find out whether anyone is coming and when.
Acceptance, arrival time and the moment the technician reaches site are on the work order without anyone asking.
Chases vendors who go quiet
Some jobs simply go quiet. The work order went out, but there's no reply, no arrival and no update after the visit, and nothing on the system flags it. Usually someone on the team notices days later, when the requester complains or a client asks why a leak is still leaking. By then the coordinator is calling round from memory, unsure who was last contacted or what was promised. Chasing is the part of the job everyone knows matters, and the part nobody has time to do consistently across every site.
In this demo
0:00 Here's the job list for Acme's Westgate campus. Most jobs show recent contact. Work order #1219, a leaking valve in the science block, doesn't: Clearflow Plumbing was assigned yesterday and hasn't replied.
0:19 Each job carries a chase clock, set from Acme's own rules. For a priority job like this one, the rule is: wait two hours, chase twice on WhatsApp, then phone.
0:38 The first chase goes out. It's short and specific: the job, the site and a direct question about when someone can attend. The timeline records the chase, and the next one is booked.
0:59 If Clearflow had replied, the next chase would simply be cancelled. The agent can tell when someone has been in touch, so it never chases a vendor who has already answered.
1:20 Two messages, no answer. The agent phones Clearflow's office and logs the call on the work order, with the time and the outcome.
1:41 The call goes to voicemail. That's the last step Acme allows before a person steps in, so the agent stops chasing.
1:58 It escalates to Sam, the coordinator for Westgate, with everything tried so far, and lets Clearflow know the job has been raised with Acme's team.
2:17 Sam picks it up with the full picture in front of him, instead of finding out from a complaint.
Late jobs surface when a requester complains, and the coordinator starts calling round.
Every quiet job is chased on your timings and escalated to a named person before it becomes a complaint.
Collects proof before a job closes
A vendor says the work is done, but there's no photo, no note of what was fixed and the invoice turns up a week later. To close the job, the coordinator has to chase all three after the technician has left site and moved on to the next job. Work orders stay open for weeks, and the ones that do close often have nothing on them to show what happened. Then an audit or a client review asks for exactly the evidence that's missing. Proof is easiest to collect while the job is still happening, and hardest to get once it's over.
In this demo
0:00 Back at Elm Street. Marco sends a message: the work on AHU-3 is finished. Before Acme counts that as done, its rules ask for a photo of the fault, a photo of the fix and the invoice.
0:18 The agent already has the first photo. Marco sent it at 2:26, and the agent added it to the work order with a note of what it shows: a snapped fan belt.
0:36 Now it asks for the after photo. When it arrives, the agent checks the report against it: a new belt fitted, the unit running. The report and the evidence agree.
0:55 Had the photo shown something else, or not arrived at all, the agent would ask again and, if the gap stayed, pass the job to the coordinator rather than close it.
1:13 A minute later Marco sends the invoice as a PDF: $480. The agent matches it to the job, the vendor and the work done, and attaches it to the work order.
1:30 Every step has a row on the timeline: sent, accepted, on site, photo, finished, invoice. Each row shows who did it, on which channel and what the agent checked.
1:45 With every step in, the agent moves the work order to completed and then closed.
2:02 The record an auditor or a client will ask for is already on the work order, built while the job happened.
Coordinators chase photos, notes and invoices after the vendor has left site, and jobs stay open for weeks.
Proof arrives with the job, and the work order closes once everything your rules ask for is on it.
Keeps vendor performance in view
When a client asks which vendors are slow to respond or keep missing visits, the honest answer often depends on who you ask. The evidence is scattered across phone logs, personal inboxes and the coordinator's memory, so vendor reviews turn into a debate about impressions. The week before a review, someone pieces together a spreadsheet by hand from all of that, and it is out of date as soon as it's finished. Vendors who perform well get no credit for it, and the ones who don't are hard to challenge without the facts.
In this demo
0:00 Every job the agent touches leaves the same kind of record: each message, chase, call and escalation on the work order timeline, with who did it and why.
0:15 That record lives in the CMMS, next to the asset and the site, not in someone's inbox. Nobody had to type it up.
0:31 Here, Hannah, Acme's facilities manager, filters this month's jobs by vendor. For Northline Mechanical she sees how quickly they accepted, how many jobs needed a chase and how many closed with complete proof.
0:49 Clearflow Plumbing tells a different story: more chases and two escalations. That isn't the coordinator's opinion. It's on each work order, one click away.
1:07 When the quarterly vendor review comes round, Hannah has the facts for each vendor, and the conversation starts from the jobs themselves.
1:28 And because every vendor got the same clear asks and the same reminders, the comparison is a fair one.
Vendor reviews rely on memory and a spreadsheet pieced together the week before.
Every vendor's record builds up job by job on the work order, ready for the next review.
How the vendor coordination agent goes live with your team
Our FM Ops Engineers build the vendor coordination agent around your rules, sites and vendors, then run it and keep fine-tuning it with you. Your coordinators need no training, and the follow-up calls start coming off their list from the first jobs it handles.
- 01 We learn your operation Our FM Ops Engineers sit with your team and map how work is assigned today.
- 02 We build the agent Your rules, sites and vendors, built into the agent with you.
- 03 We run it Deployed, maintained and fine-tuned by our team. Your team gets the outcome.
