As a facility manager, coordinating service requests with external contractors can be unnecessarily time-consuming if not handled effectively. You often have to manually enter details like building and contact person into an email, and when the contractor arrives on site, they often lack clear instructions on who to contact because they cannot find the correct email.
With the Dalux Supplier portal, you can assign work orders directly to suppliers, ensuring that external contractors have all the information they need up front.
External contractors can also use their mobile devices to report completed work, including photo and full log.
Order work from suppliers
To assign work to an external contractor, create a work order and link it to a supplier by selecting them from the list. Selecting a supplier automatically adds the default contact from your organization, ensuring that the supplier has a point of contact for access or other information needed to complete the work order.
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In this case, the work order has been sent to the external supplier. If the supplier has any questions or needs clarification, he can see who to contact.
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If you want to learn more about ordering work, you can read this article: Supplier portal: Order work orders from a supplier
Supplier portal
The external contractor now has access to the work order with the original information on his desktop and mobile device.
They now has the ability to reject or approve the work order, assign it internally to the employee who will perform the task, or send a message to the customer.
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Supplier portal administration
To be able to assign work orders to an external supplier, the Dalux FM administrator must create a company with the company type set to 'Supplier' and configure the settings as described in this article: Supplier portal: Set up companies
Company information
Companies in Dalux FM can be configured in several ways, here is a typical setup for a supplier:
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- Set the company type to Supplier.
- Specify the region in which this supplier can operate. Work orders can only be assigned to the supplier within this specified region. In this case, a single building is selected.
- If the 'Tasks need approval' option is selected, the facility manager must approve work orders before they can be marked as complete.
- For this supplier, all work orders are first sent to the dispatcher, who assigns them to an employee. This process ensures that the content is reviewed prior to execution. When the employee completes the task and returns the work order, the dispatcher reviews the details before sending it back to the facility manager.
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After completing the initial setup, the next step is to add at least one administrator to the company.
The administrator will have elevated permissions to manage the workflow of the company. This user will have the authority to invite people to the Supplier portal, assign roles, and oversee all tasks associated with the company.
In addition, the administrator has full visibility into every work order assigned to the company.
Read more about setting up a company as a supplier here: Supplier portal: Set up companies
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If you want to learn more about Supplier portal, you can read these articles: Supplier portal: Use as a supplier on desktop and Supplier portal: Use as a supplier on mobile