Manage your entire supply chain automatically
Your AI employee manages every supplier relationship — requesting quotes, comparing responses, confirming bookings, chasing completion, and flagging SLA breaches. Whether you have 50 suppliers or 500, every relationship is tracked and every deadline is met.
The challenge
Why this workflow is broken today
Quote chasing is a full-time job
For every non-routine repair or planned work, procurement teams must request quotes from approved suppliers, chase responses, compare on cost and quality, and award the work. This cycle repeats thousands of times per year and is almost entirely manual.
SLA breaches go undetected
Without automated monitoring, contractors who consistently miss deadlines or quality standards are only identified through anecdotal feedback or after a complaint. By then, the damage to tenant satisfaction (and potentially safety) is already done.
Contractor performance is hard to benchmark
With dozens of suppliers across different trades and regions, there's no easy way to compare performance. Which roofer has the best first-time fix rate? Which electrician is cheapest but also fastest? These questions go unanswered.
How your AI employee handles this
From request to resolution
Request and collect quotes
When a job requires an external quote, the AI employee sends specifications to your approved suppliers for that trade and area. It chases non-responders, collects all quotes, and presents a comparison matrix showing cost, availability, historical performance rating and SLA compliance rate.
Award and confirm
Based on your procurement rules (lowest cost, best value, preferred supplier, rotation), the AI employee recommends an award. Once approved (or auto-awarded within your thresholds), it confirms the booking, sends the work order, and sets up milestone tracking.
Track delivery and SLAs
The AI employee monitors every active job against its agreed timeline. It sends the contractor reminders before key milestones, requests completion confirmation, and immediately flags overdue work. Persistent SLA breaches are escalated to your procurement manager with a performance summary.
Build a performance scorecard
Over time, the AI employee builds a detailed performance profile for every contractor: response time, quote competitiveness, completion rate, first-time fix rate, tenant satisfaction scores, and SLA compliance. This data feeds directly into your annual supplier reviews and procurement decisions.
Scenario
How Meridian Housing Partnership would use this
Organisation
Meridian Housing Partnership
A group of three housing associations operating a shared procurement function across 28,000 homes, with 140 approved contractors across 25 trade categories.
Challenge
Meridian's procurement team of 4 was managing over 6,000 individual contractor engagements per year. Quote turnaround averaged 9 working days, and 23% of contractors were regularly breaching their SLA targets without consequence. The team had no time for strategic supplier management.
Approach
The AI employee was connected to Meridian's contractor database, procurement portal and HMS. It took over quote management, SLA monitoring and routine contractor communications, while the procurement team retained award decisions above £10,000 and strategic supplier relationship management.
Projected results
“We finally have data-driven conversations with our contractors instead of relying on gut feeling. The underperformers either improved or were replaced — the AI made it impossible to hide.”
— Head of Procurement, Meridian Housing Partnership (representative scenario)
This is a representative scenario based on typical client profiles. Specific results vary by organisation.
Frequently asked questions
Common questions about this workflow
Can it enforce our framework agreements and approved supplier lists?
Absolutely. The AI employee is configured with your approved supplier list and framework agreements. It only sends quote requests to approved contractors for each trade and area, applies agreed framework rates where applicable, and flags any attempt to use a non-approved supplier.
How does it handle emergencies when the preferred contractor isn't available?
For emergency work, the AI employee works down your priority list in real time. If the preferred contractor can't attend within the required timeframe, it automatically contacts the next approved supplier, and so on. The target is always to find an available, qualified contractor within your emergency SLA window.
Can contractors interact with the AI employee directly?
Yes. Contractors can confirm appointments, report completion, request extensions, submit invoices and raise queries through email or a simple web interface. The AI employee responds immediately, reducing the back-and-forth that currently clogs your team's inboxes.
How does the performance scorecard work?
Each contractor accumulates scores across five dimensions: responsiveness (quote speed), cost competitiveness, completion timeliness, quality (first-time fix rate and callbacks), and tenant satisfaction. Scores are updated after every job and visible to your procurement team in a live dashboard.
Related solutions
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Tenant Communication
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Compliance Monitoring
Track every safety certificate and regulatory deadline in real time.
Explore commercial real estate
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