Blog›Implementation
Setting up without an implementation partner
Rolling out operations software has long meant an implementation project: workshops, an integrator, a quarter of calendar time and a bill for every change after go-live. Now the person who owns the process can describe the work, or upload the forms they already use, and review what the agent builds.
The implementation industry
Inspections, maintenance rounds, site visits, meter readings and safety checks have always come with a shadow industry attached. Buying the platform was the cheap part. Around it came the scoping workshops, the certified implementation partner, the forms someone built for you, the workflows someone else wired, the who-sees-what matrix, the training sessions, and then a change request, billed by the day, every time reality disagreed with the configuration.
None of that was a scam. It existed because the platforms were configuration consoles only a specialist could drive: every inspection round, work order and handover had to be modelled by hand, field by field, rule by rule. So the expertise sat outside your organisation, and you rented it at kick-off and again at every change.
When the agent does the configuring
Much of that specialist work is now something you can ask for. A housing maintenance lead tells the agent: "build a repair visit report with a photo of the fault, an urgency rating, and a follow-up section that only appears when the repair could not be completed. The tenant liaison signs off after the contractor." What comes back is a draft with the conditional section and both sign-off steps already in place, for her to check and publish. An energy company describes its substation round the same way, and a site manager a snag list with a two-step close-out.
Projects, locations, people, groups and dashboards are set up by asking too. Live in a day, not a quarter covers that side in more detail.
Your old forms come with you
In a classic implementation, someone rebuilds your Excel checklists and PDF forms inside the new system, field by field. Here you upload them and the agent produces draft templates for you to check, so what your team learned running those forms carries over without weeks of retyping.
Who runs the platform now
The person who owns the process, provided they're allowed to edit templates. When the meter-reading round needs a new field, the person who runs the round adds it by asking the agent. When a client insists on a tighter sign-off, the operations lead tightens it the same afternoon, without disturbing records already under way.
Setting up is one half of the job; filling in the records is the other. See Filing a record from a sentence or a photo.