Catering and service providers

Overview

Define service providers for your managed buildings and let the users order items from the service providers. A service provider can be an internal or an external party that provides services. These services can be ordered by the users.

A service provider can be, for example:

• Catering service provider
  Provides food and drink services, that can be ordered by the employees for a meeting or a special event. Typical services are soft drinks, sandwiches, cakes, coffee, or tee.
• Facility service provider
  Provides services that can be delivered by the office management upon request. Typical services are the preparation of the meeting rooms in a special way, such as a seating re-arrangement.
• Cleaning service provider
  Provides cleaning services, which is normally done through regular cleaning cycles. However, in some cases an extra cleaning service is required. Colleagues could order a service such as empty the trash, clean the window, clean the coffee machine or coffee on the carpet.

You can define any other service provider based on your needs as well and configure the service items.

Office assignment

A service provider can be an external service provider, but it can be an internal service as well. Let's take the catering service provider as an example. An organization with 2 offices: Big Office and the Small Office.

The Big Office has a cantina, which is managed by an external service provider called Provider EXT, and therefore we can create a service provider with items that can be provided by the external service provider. These service items can be delivered only in the Big Office building and not in the Small Office.

The Small Office also requires catering service; however, there are not enough employees to outsource it to an external. The office manager or the assistant is responsible usually for the catering service. This way, the provider will be an internal provider called Provider INT. The items provided will be most probably the items from the next bakery near the office. The orders will be managed internally by the office managers. The provider will be linked with the Small Office and not with the Big Office.

Both providers can have different limitations applied to their services.

Limitations

A service cannot be ordered ad-hoc and in an unlimited way; therefore, we have configurations to limit the service order per provider. For the sake of simplicity, we will explain the limitations in the case of a catering service provider; however, it can be any other service provider as well.

The following limitations can be set:

• Time limitation
  Ordering a service ad-hoc is not possible, there needs to be a time grace period that needs to be respected to order a service. In the case of a catering service, it should be at least 1–2 days ahead. With the time limitations, you can decide how many days are required as a grace period to automatically accept an order.
• Number of items
  The users should not be able to order unlimited service items. Ordering 10 cakes or 100 cakes can make a huge difference if the order is automatically accepted. There are also services that may be ordered only once per order. You can set a limit per order item.
• Order value limitation (under development)
  The order can also be limited. You can set a value per item, and the total value of the order can be limited per service provider. Orders above the limit will not be accepted automatically. They will be pending orders, that need to be accepted by an administrator.
• Special items (under development)
  Some items cannot be ordered automatically. Independent of an order time or value, they always need to be approved; therefore they will be pending orders.

Order process

A service provider order has multiple statuses, depending on the limitations applied for the order. The main statuses are: ACCEPTED, PENDING, REJECTED and REVOKED and PENDING REVOKE.

ACCEPTED
An order is accepted, if the order is not limited through any of the limitations listed above.

PENDING
An order is pending, if the order was created or edited and a limitation applies. An administrator can ACCEPT or REJECT a pending order.

REJECTED
An accepted, or a pending order can be rejected by the administrator at any time.

REVOKED
An ACCEPTED or a PENDING order can be revoked by the user outside the grace period defined for the orders; however, if an order needs to be delivered within a few minutes and the user tries to revoke the order then it will be a PENDING REVOKE, which need to be accepted by an administrator.

An administrator can put the provider orders in any status except the revoke statuses.

Assign providers