Fault reports and repair requests that book and schedule themselves as work orders
Retyping a job from an email or PDF easily takes 10 minutes per report. An AI colleague reads every fault report and repair request, from email, the housing association's PDF or the portal, links client, contract and property, and creates the work order straight in 4PS, BouwWorks, Bouw7, Metacom or Acto. It then schedules the job with the right engineer, within the response time, and confirms the appointment with the resident.
Knowing which contract and response time belong to a report is a skill only a few people have
Reports and work instructions come in dozens of shapes: an email with a PDF from the housing association, every association with its own layout, a portal, a web form. Every report has to go to the right client, contract and property, with the right urgency. That knowledge often sits with one or two people in the back office. When they are away or overloaded, the pile grows, response times slip and invoicing stalls.
Clients, contracts and response times
In construction, a report is rarely just a report. Every housing association has its own contract, with its own response times, rates and terms on what is covered. The AI colleague leaves that logic where it belongs, in your ERP, and creates the work order against the right client, contract and property. You hit your SLAs, and the arguments afterwards about what is and is not covered by the contract disappear.
Absorb peaks without extra people
The flow of reports is rarely even. The fault season, the first frost and a stormy day create waves. The AI colleague scales with the volume: whether ten or a thousand reports come in, they are processed at the same pace. You do not need temporary staff you have to train first.
Scheduling without the phone tag
A work order is only done once it has an engineer and a time slot. In the fault season the schedule fills up, appointments get phoned back and forth and residents never hear when the engineer is coming. The AI colleague looks at trade, region, availability and the response time in the contract, proposes a slot in the right engineer's calendar and confirms the appointment with the resident. Urgent, safety-related and unusual jobs go straight to your planner.
From report to scheduled work order, in six steps
- 01
Intake
The AI colleague watches the channels reports and work instructions come in through: the mailbox with PDFs from housing associations, portals and web forms.
- 02
Extraction
Address, description of the fault or defect, urgency, order number and the resident's contact details are pulled from the report in a structured way, in any format.
- 03
Client & contract matching
Client, contract, property and installation are matched against your ERP, with the response time that belongs to the contract.
- 04
Work order in the ERP
The work order is created directly in your ERP, with no intermediate layer. After the job, the engineer's job sheet is processed into an invoice.
- 05
Scheduling
The AI colleague picks the engineer by trade, region and availability, books a slot in the calendar within the response time and sends the resident an appointment confirmation. Urgent jobs go straight to your planner.
- 06
Human in the loop
When in doubt, the report is put to a colleague. Every validation feeds the memory, per client and per contract.
From 10 minutes to 10 seconds per report
Dammers Bouw does service and maintenance for housing associations, among others. Repair requests arrived by email, often as a PDF in each association's own format, and the back office typed them into BouwWorks by hand. Since December 2025 the AI colleague does that, straight in BouwWorks and without an extra tool, and once the job is done it creates the customer invoice too. In its first three months it processed 462 reports, with a person involved in 4.36% of them. That freed up about 1 FTE for customer contact and invoicing.
Read the full case studyStraight answers
Then the AI colleague escalates to a member of your team instead of creating a work order. The question is put forward with the original email and PDF next to it.
The AI colleague recognises urgency from the description, such as a leak, no heating or a safety risk, and from the response time in the contract. Urgent reports go straight to your planner, with the work order already prepared.
Yes. Once the work order is in, the AI colleague finds the right engineer by trade, region and availability and proposes a time slot within the contract's response time, in the calendars in your ERP or planning tool. The resident gets an appointment confirmation. You decide whether your planner confirms every proposal or whether it may schedule on its own. At H4A this already runs on Metacom and Bizzstream.
The AI colleague books nothing and puts the instruction forward with the advice to get written approval first. You decide the threshold.
We leave those entirely to your ERP. The AI colleague creates the work order against the right client, contract and property, after which your rates, surcharges and contract terms are applied automatically. That keeps one source of truth.
No, that is what it is built for. At Dammers Bouw each housing association sends its own PDF format. Every validation by your team is remembered per client, so the longer it runs, the less it needs to ask.
Yes. If a work instruction already comes in through DICO, it is already in your ERP. The AI colleague handles everything outside it: associations that still work by email and PDF, portals and web forms.
Yes, if you want it to. At Dammers Bouw the AI colleague creates the customer invoice in BouwWorks as soon as the job is done. You can also choose to only process the job sheet, so your back office does the invoicing itself.
You decide. You can let it book on its own when the confidence score is high, or have every report put forward. In practice customers start by reviewing everything and move that line once the numbers justify it.
Yes. Send us a description of your report process and, if you like, a handful of anonymised work instructions. We will bring a demo to the meeting that is set up on your process and your data.
Have your report flow reviewed in a Quick Scan
In 90 minutes we map your report flow together: volumes, channels, clients, contracts, your scheduling and your ERP. Within two weeks you have a concrete plan.
- 90 minutes, on site or remote
- A demo on your process and your data, no generic slides
- A concrete plan within two weeks
- No strings attached