Every system read, every open job counted, months of the desk’s phone log worked through. Every count measured from the operation’s own systems; hours measured where the systems hold them, otherwise stated as assumptions; every pound priced with the assumption on the page. Then the fixes, shown running.
Fernmoor FM is not a real company. It is based on real FM operations we have worked inside, with every figure adjusted to protect the clients: scaled to one business size, rounded and reshaped, while keeping the patterns we actually found.
| Price | From £7,500, fixed before we start. More than two client CAFMs, a CAFM we don’t yet support, or more than one desk raises the fixed price, agreed before we start. |
| Duration | About three weeks from the day access is in place. |
| What we read | Your job system and your clients’ CAFMs, read-only; three months of your phone log; a month of the desk rota; a sample of call recordings; walkthroughs with the people who do the work. |
| What you provide | Read-only logins, the phone log and rota exports, your site list, a few finance figures (role costs, night rates, average invoice value, three months of credit notes), and six to eight hours of your people’s time across the three weeks. |
| What you get | A ranked loss map with the evidence behind every number, the assumptions and what we refused to price, a roadmap with fixed prices for the first Proofs, a register of the tools your teams already use, the day’s list shown running on your own jobs, and, where you run a desk on a CAFM we support, the call demonstration. |
Engineers attend, jobs close, clients get served. The money goes in the gaps between systems and people: work keyed twice, calls chasing jobs that should already be moving, finished work nobody has billed, and nights that hang on one person.
An FM contractor running 2,500 reactive jobs a month, 1,800 of them arriving through clients’ own CAFMs, with about 1,000 jobs open at any one time and a helpdesk of 12 full-time equivalents covering days and nights. Every figure in this report is sized to that business.
A daily operating list built from the job system as it stands: the return visits, the jobs waiting to be billed and the jobs dying on hold, each in front of the person who moves it. Read-only, so it runs on live data from day one, and it goes after up to £168k of held-up cash first.
The re-keying connector, proved against a copy of a client’s CAFM seeded with Fernmoor’s own jobs. At £135k a year of re-keying, the Proof and the build together cost less than a month of it.
Every count is measured from the operation’s own systems; hours are measured where the systems hold them, otherwise stated as assumptions. Each finding is marked Measured (read from the systems), Observed (seen in walkthroughs) or Reported (a figure the operation gave us). The step to pounds uses the assumptions named in Priced with and set out in section 04. Cash rows are money held up once, not lost every year.
| Ref | Stage | What we found | Priced with | A year | The fix |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fix 1 | Intake & completion | 1,800 jobs a month arriving through clients’ CAFMs, each keyed in and its completion keyed back Measured | A11 · A1 | £135k | Connector, both ways |
| Fix 2 | Intake & chase | 9,900 hours a year on the desk phones; 8,500 of them new-job, chase and contractor calls Measured | A10 · A2 · A1 | £95k–£175k | Software desk operator (not a hire) |
| Fix 3 | Out of hours | Every night, 10pm to 6am, covered by one person for 15–20 calls Measured | A1 · A3 | £55k–£69k | Software desk operator out of hours |
| Fix 4 | Completion | Job cards sent to customers unread and client photos not carried across, on 30,000 jobs a year Observed | A5 | £26k–£53k | Job card clean-up + carry attachments |
| Fix 5 | Mobilisation | Around eight weeks of manual set-up for each new client contract Reported | A7 · A1 | £6k–£11k | Mobilisation tool |
| Fix 6 | Reporting | Jobs raised without reporting tags; every month-end report rebuilt by hand Observed | A6 · A1 | £3k–£8k | Validate at the point of raising |
| Fix 7 | Quoting | Site surveys typed on tablets, then retyped into quotes Observed | A8 · A1 | £3k–£6k | Survey-to-quote capture |
| Fix 8 | Billing | About 190 jobs completed and waiting to be priced up Measured | A4 Cash | £48k–£95k | Price-up queue |
| Fix 9 | Chase | About 1,000 jobs open, three in four past due; about 145 stuck on a return visit or on hold Measured | A4 Cash | £36k–£73k | Daily operating list |
| Fix 10 | Commercial | An open quote book worth several million pounds, never reconciled Measured | Not priced | n/a | Reconcile before relying on it |
| Fix 11 | Tools & knowledge | Departments building their own tools on private accounts; nobody can see what exists Observed | Not priced | n/a | Tools register + company workspace |
£324,000–£457,000 a year leaking across Fix 1 to Fix 7: measured counts and hours, priced with the assumptions in section 04. On top of that, £84,000–£168,000 of cash is sitting in finished or stalled jobs (Fix 8 and Fix 9), waiting for someone to move them.
Of 2,500 jobs a month, 1,800 arrive in a client’s CAFM and are typed into Fernmoor’s own system. The engineer completes the job once; an administrator types the completion, times and certificates back into the client’s. Two manual crossings on every one.
At ten minutes a crossing (A11), that is 7,200 hours a year, or £135,000 at £32,000 fully loaded (A1).
Operations director; the administrators doing the crossing.
A connector that matches on the client’s own job reference, writes each side and reads the record back to prove it landed. Prove £2,500; build £6,000 for the first two directions. £8,500 is less than a month of the loss, and about three months even if the fix removes only a quarter of it.
Every call in the phone log, annualised: about 95,500 calls in, averaging just over four minutes of talk, and 58,500 dialled out: 9,900 hours a year on the phone, 5.8 FTE, nearly half the 12 FTE desk. Of the calls with an outcome recorded, nearly a third of inbound calls were someone chasing a job already raised, and nearly half of outbound calls were the desk chasing: 34,000 chase calls a year among the calls with an outcome recorded. About a third of phone time had no outcome recorded at all, so the true figure is higher. On the biggest client alone, about 400 jobs are open, more than 80% past their fix target.
The calls a software operator is built for (logging new jobs, sites chasing in, chasing out, contractor calls) come to about 8,500 hours a year: 5.0 FTE. Taking 60–80% of them (A10), plus the off-phone work around each chase (A2), frees 3.0–5.5 FTE of the day desk: £95,000–£175,000 a year at £32,000 fully loaded (A1). With nights (Fix 3), 4.7–7.2 FTE, two-fifths to three-fifths of the desk.
Helpdesk manager; account champions.
A software desk operator, not a new hire. It answers the call, raises the job in the CAFM against the client’s own questions and priorities, gives the site a real status when they ring, and chases the contractor who has gone quiet. Proven on real calls to a working desk line, in a test queue. The freed time is capacity, not redundancies: the next contract without the next hire. Build £14,000; running costs indicative (A9). With nights, net of running costs, that is about £105,000–£220,000 a year back: the build pays for itself within about two months.
From the phone log, between 10pm and 6am: every night is covered by a single person, handling 15–20 calls, about half coming in, half dialled out, so the chasing carries on overnight too. Around a sixth of all desk hours are worked by agency staff.
Continuity first: one sick call and the out-of-hours line has nobody on it. In pounds, one person for eight hours every night is 2,920 hours a year: £54,900 at £32,000 fully loaded (A1), or £68,600 with a night premium (A3).
Helpdesk manager; HR.
The software desk operator in Fix 2 answers out of hours, so night cover stops hanging on one person, with a duty manager called only when something carries commercial or safety consequence. Included in the Fix 2 build.
Sites, assets, permissions and admin for each new client contract are set up by hand over around eight weeks (the operation’s own figure), and that is where most set-up errors start.
One person half- to full-time across the eight weeks, two new contracts a year (A7): £5,600–£11,100 a year, before the cost of every contract starting two months late.
Mobilisation lead; IT.
Map the incoming client’s set-up, then load it with a tool rather than by hand, checked record by record. Priced once the incoming set-up has been mapped.
About 190 jobs sit completed and waiting to be priced up. The engineer has been; the invoice has not gone.
£48,000–£95,000 of finished work waiting for an invoice, at £250–£500 a job (A4). It is cash, not efficiency: the fastest money in this report.
Finance; commercial.
A price-up queue on the daily operating list, oldest first. Inside the Fix 9 Proof, no separate cost.
Every open job read in full: about 1,000 open, three in four past due, a handful by more than a year. Around 115 are waiting on a return visit (parts required, a second person, an abortive call-out), flagged by the engineers’ own app and mostly overdue. On Hold is where jobs die: about 30, nearly all overdue. More than 20 job statuses in use, and nobody working to a list.
£36,000–£73,000 of cash held up: about 145 jobs waiting on a return visit or a decision, at £250–£500 a job (A4), none of which can be invoiced until someone moves it. Before any SLA credits.
Helpdesk and scheduling; account managers.
A daily operating list: a handful of buckets instead of 20-plus statuses, each job in front of the person who moves it. Read-only (it changes nothing in the job system), so it runs on live data from the first day. Prove £2,500; run cost agreed before it goes live.
Counts, hours and call volumes come from the systems. Turning them into pounds takes eleven more inputs. Fernmoor isn’t real, so here they are assumed. In your Diagnose, nine become your own figures or are timed during the three weeks, one is our price, and one can only be measured once the fix is running. The last column says which.
| Ref | Assumption | Value used | Basis in this sample | In your Diagnose |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| A1 | Fully loaded cost of a desk, admin or survey person | £32,000 a year, £18.80 an hour | Over 1,702 working hours (37 hours × 46 weeks); the same hours define an FTE throughout | Your figure: payroll cost of these roles, with on-costs |
| A2 | Off-phone work around each chase call | None, up to as long again as the call | Call time is measured; logging updates and emailing contractors is not in the phone log | Timed: 20 chase calls followed from pick-up to the last update logged |
| A3 | Night premium | 0–25% on night hours | Illustrative range | Your figure: night shift pay rates |
| A4 | Average value of a reactive job | £250–£500 | £250 is a common not-to-exceed limit on routine reactive jobs in the operations we drew on | Your figure: average reactive invoice, from the finance system |
| A5 | Jobs credited or disputed over a bad job card or missing photos | 0.25–0.5% of 30,000 jobs a year, at £350 | Job volume from the job system; the rate and value are illustrative | Your figure: three months of credit notes, with the reason for each |
| A6 | Month-end reporting rebuilt by hand | 2–5 days a month | Illustrative | Timed: one month-end report, sitting with the person who builds it |
| A7 | Mobilisation effort | One person, half- to full-time for eight weeks; two contracts a year | Illustrative | Your figure: who worked on the last mobilisation, and for how long |
| A8 | Survey retyping | 20–40 minutes a survey, 10 a week | Illustrative | Timed: five surveys followed from site to quote |
| A9 | Running cost of the software desk operator | £25,000–£45,000 a year | Indicative: a monthly fee plus a per-call charge on 81,000–106,000 calls a year; fixed with the client before anything goes live | Our price: quoted in the roadmap, fixed in writing before anything goes live |
| A10 | Share of new-job, chase and contractor calls the software operator takes | 60–80% | Illustrative; the operator is proven on real calls to a working desk line, in a test queue | Measured in the Prove: it can’t be known until it runs on your own line |
| A11 | Time per manual crossing between systems | 10 minutes each way | Illustrative | Timed: 20 crossings, each way |
An assumption with a stated basis is honest. A number that would mislead the board is not, so these stay out of the total.
| Ref | What we would not price | Why | What would price it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fix 10 | The open quote book, as a pipeline | Nobody has reconciled which quotes are live, won, lost or duplicated, and calling it a pipeline would flatter the business | A reconciliation of open quotes against clients |
| Fix 2 · Fix 9 | Contracts lost to missed SLAs | A lost contract is not an hours number, and three in four open jobs past due make it a live risk | Renewal dates and the SLA record for each client |
| Fix 11 | Risk from tools on private accounts | A continuity problem, not an hours one | The tools register itself |
Sequenced by value, by evidence and by risk: nothing writes to a live record until it has been proved against a copy seeded with the operation’s own jobs.
The day’s list is part of every Diagnose. The call demonstration is added where the operation runs a desk on a CAFM we support. Both are illustrative, not production: they show the fix working so the board decides on something it has seen.
| Demonstration | What the board sees | Ref |
|---|---|---|
| The software operator, answering | Where the operation runs a desk and we already support its CAFM (VX Suite, Concerto, Joblogic and Arez today): a call to a demonstration line, answered by software: one of the client’s own sites identified, the fault taken, the client’s required questions asked, and the job raised in a test copy of their CAFM, with the reference read back before the caller hangs up. | Fix 2 · Fix 3 · Fix 6 |
| The day’s list | This morning’s open jobs, read from the job system as it stands, sorted into the buckets the desk would actually work: return visits waiting on parts, jobs dying on hold, finished work waiting to be billed. | Fix 8 · Fix 9 |
| Source | How it is read | Ref |
|---|---|---|
| Job system | Signed in read-only; every open job and every status counted, not sampled. Every request logged, so it can be shown that nothing was written. | Fix 8 · Fix 9 · Fix 10 |
| Client CAFMs | Mapped screen by screen and field by field, read-only. | Fix 1 · Fix 5 · Fix 6 |
| Phone log | Three months, every call: direction, talk and after-call time, and the outcome each agent recorded. | Fix 2 · Fix 3 |
| Desk rota | A month of shifts: hours, agency and night cover. | Fix 3 |
| Call recordings | A sample, listened to for how the desk actually takes a job. | Fix 2 |
| Walkthroughs | The people who do the work (administrators, coordinators, surveyors), not only their managers. | Fix 4 · Fix 7 · Fix 11 |
This report and the evidence behind every number (the job lists, the call breakdowns and the calculations), along with the assumptions, the refusals, the roadmap with fixed prices for the first Proofs, and the tools register. What stays ours is the tooling: the system maps and configurations we use to read and work your systems.
Diagnose from £7,500, fixed before we start, about three weeks: every system read, every job counted, every leak priced on your own numbers, and the fixes shown running on your own jobs. Then Prove the one you choose, £2,500 fixed, two weeks.
Sample Diagnose · illustrative