Triage that escalates danger and deduplicates the rest
Maintenance reports across roughly 480 units, where the hard requirement is never delaying a gas, fire, flood or safeguarding report.
A managing agent overseeing around 480 residential and small commercial units, turning over just over two million pounds.
A delivered Orchyn engagement. The client is anonymised at their request. The company and the people are not named. The operation, the workflow, the controls and the outcome are as delivered.
The commercial problem
Reports arrive by email, web form, call and photograph. Duplicates, incomplete information and unclear responsibility slow repairs down.
Tenants contact several people for updates while the coordinator rebuilds each case history before answering. Communication is reactive because status sits across inboxes and contractor messages.
How the work runs before
- A tenant reports an issue by email, form, phone or photograph.
- The coordinator logs the case manually.
- They search property, tenancy and past repair history for context.
- Urgent cases are phoned to a contractor and escalated to the operations lead.
- Other cases wait for more detail or are assigned to a contractor.
- Updates are made by hand across case notes and inboxes while the tenant chases.
What makes it hard to automate safely
- Fire, gas, electrical danger, flooding, safeguarding and vulnerable tenant reports require immediate human escalation. This is the design constraint everything else bends around.
- The model must not diagnose a fault, instruct a tenant on safety, authorise cost or choose a contractor.
- Personal data is limited to what the maintenance workflow actually requires.
- Duplicates and missing information must be identified while the original report is preserved intact.
What we change first
An explicit escalation taxonomy was written first, naming the categories that bypass the queue entirely. Deciding what counts as an emergency is a policy question, not a technical one. It was settled with the client before any model was involved.
The redesigned workflow
- A report arrives through any approved channel into one intake.
- The model classifies it, extracts property, unit, issue type and access details, then links the original report and photographs.
- An emergency category bypasses the queue and alerts a named person immediately.
- Probable duplicates are flagged against open cases rather than merged automatically.
- The coordinator confirms the case, requests missing detail using a drafted message and assigns a contractor.
Where the model stops
The model classifies, extracts and flags duplicates. It never diagnoses a fault, advises a tenant on safety, authorises spend or picks a contractor. Escalation is one directional: it can raise urgency, never lower it.
What we learned
The safety requirement shaped the whole build. Once escalation had to be immediate and one directional, the rest of the design followed. It is a good example of a constraint improving a system rather than limiting it.