A facilities contractor unifies voice and job assignment across a multi-site contract

A facilities management contractor running a three-site commercial contract had the same problem on all three: the CAFM system tracked work orders well, but nobody could see where an engineer actually was once they left the helpdesk's line of sight. Plant rooms, roof access, and basement risers all sat in weak mobile coverage pockets. A missed call from the helpdesk often meant a job sat untouched for longer than it should, and the duty manager's default fix was driving between sites to reassign work in person.

Radios existed at one site but not the other two, bought years apart from different suppliers and never standardised. Engineers used personal mobiles for anything urgent, which meant the helpdesk had no reliable way to reach someone who had stepped into a plant room with no signal.

The rollout

The contractor registered on RevoNet and piloted on the largest of the three sites first: one talkgroup for that site's engineering team, and the CAFM tool left exactly as it was for work order tracking. The duty manager ran the pilot from a tablet rather than a desktop, since most of the working day was spent moving between floors rather than sitting at a desk.

Engineers already carried Android phones for other work apps, so the RevoNet client went on hardware that existed, with device pairing done in the site office rather than mid-shift. The pilot ran for a few weeks before the second site was added.

After the first month

The clearest change was in how jobs got reassigned. Previously, if an engineer was unreachable, the duty manager's only real option was to drive to where they thought that engineer might be. With the live map, the duty manager could see who was online and roughly where, and reassign a job to whoever was actually closest without leaving their current floor. That single change cut a noticeable amount of the driving-between-buildings time that had quietly become part of the role.

The incident record also gave the contractor something concrete to hand a client when a response-time question came up, rather than reconstructing a sequence of phone calls after the fact. It did not replace the formal CAFM report the client expected, but it filled the gap between "the ticket was raised" and "the ticket was closed" with an accurate timeline instead of a guess.

Extending to the other two sites

The second and third sites were added once the first site's talkgroup structure had settled, each as its own group so one building's routine chatter never reached engineers working somewhere else. The contractor kept the existing radios at the one site that had them, running both systems in parallel for a short overlap rather than switching everything over on a single day.

What they would do differently

The duty manager wished they had briefed engineers on busy and idle status before the first live shift rather than after a minor mix-up in the first week, when two engineers spoke over each other on a talkgroup neither had used before. A short explanation up front would have avoided that.

Pairing devices in the site office the day before a new engineer's first shift, rather than at the start of that shift, also removed a source of delay once the team adopted it as standard practice.

Where they are now

Voice, live position, and job incidents now run across all three sites, alongside the CAFM tool the client's contract already specifies. The duty manager still uses the tablet for most of the working day, and the amount of driving between sites purely to relay information has dropped enough that it is no longer treated as a normal part of the role.

The contractor is now considering the same approach for further sites as new contracts come up, using the same one-talkgroup-per-site structure that worked for the first three.

If your team is coordinating engineers across more than one site, start with a free two-user pilot on the largest site before deciding whether to extend it further.