Most facility teams do not lose time on the big, dramatic jobs. They lose it on the small, repeating ones: chasing an overdue inspection, remembering a licence renewal, checking whether a work order has quietly slipped past its deadline. These tasks are simple, but there are hundreds of them, and someone has to remember every one.
FacilityFlow takes that remembering off people's shoulders. It runs more than 130 scheduled jobs in the background, each following clear rules that you can read and check. This article walks through what happens on a typical day, week and month, and why we think plain, rule-based automation is easier to trust.
Every five minutes: keeping service promises
The fastest job in the system runs every 5 minutes. It checks work orders against their service level agreements, escalates the ones that are close to breaching, and flags the ones that have already breached. Fault and helpdesk SLA timers are refreshed on the same rhythm.
For a facility manager this means a late job does not wait for the next morning meeting to be noticed. The person who needs to know is told while there is still time to act. The same five-minute cycle also drives a watchdog that keeps an eye on the background workers themselves, which we come back to below.
Hourly and every six hours: keeping the picture current
Some jobs run every hour. They take snapshots of system metrics, check permit-to-work and risk assessment deadlines, refresh observation timers, watch incident-report deadlines, send emergency-leave reminders and import data from building management systems.
Equipment health scores are recalculated every 6 hours. Each asset carries a score that you can sort and filter, so a supervisor can start the day with the list of equipment that most needs attention instead of opening records one by one.
Daily: the overdue list nobody has to write
The daily jobs are where much of the paperwork disappears. Overnight, FacilityFlow looks for overdue planned maintenance visits, calibration that has come due, expiring licences and certificates, expiring PPE and documents, contract obligations and notices, and expiry of visitor and space bookings. It also calculates OEE, depreciation, vendor ratings and ABC inventory classification, and sends management summaries and a data-quality digest.
The result is that the morning starts with a ready-made list of what is late, what is about to be late and what needs a decision. Reminders go out in steps, so a licence is flagged well before it lapses rather than on the day.
Monthly: the packs and the rosters
Once a month, FacilityFlow prepares the monthly contract pack with scores, statements and reports, closes the utility period, updates the carbon footprint and sustainability dashboard, and generates rosters. These are the tasks that used to take someone a day or two of copying figures between spreadsheets at month end.
Why rule-based automation is easier to trust
Every automated job in FacilityFlow follows a rule that someone configured and can inspect. If a work order escalated, you can see which rule fired and when. If a reminder was sent, there is a log of it. Nothing happens for reasons you cannot explain to an auditor, a client or your own director.
That matters because automation is only useful if people believe it. A team that suspects the system is guessing will keep its own spreadsheet on the side. A team that can see the rules tends to let go of the spreadsheet.
Watching the machinery: System Health and the job watchdog
Automation that fails silently is worse than no automation, so FacilityFlow watches its own jobs. The System Health workspace shows failed background jobs, scheduler failures, overdue job runs, queue depth and heartbeat age. A job register tracks how long each run takes, and a watchdog checks every 5 minutes for missed runs and stalled queues and raises an alert when something is wrong.
How FacilityFlow helps
FacilityFlow brings work orders, planned maintenance, licences, calibration, contracts and reporting into one platform, with 164 reports and an offline mobile app for technicians. The scheduled jobs do the routine checking, and your team spends its time on the work that needs judgement. If you would like to see a day of FacilityFlow automation running on your own sites, book a demo and we will walk you through it.
