BackgroundThe number nobody in FM can give you
Ask most facilities management businesses how many site visits they missed last year and the honest answer is that the number exists but it's spread across half a dozen systems that were never designed to talk to each other. Smarter Services was no exception. 7 operational systems held the evidence between them, and none of them were connected or 'spoke' to each other.
That is the position most of the industry still occupies, and it sits oddly alongside what the business had actually built. Smarter Services has looked after buildings since 2006, now runs more than 300 sites across estate, student accommodation, build-to-rent and healthcare, and holds one of the strongest client retention rates in the sector. Key Capital Partners had taken a significant minority stake to fund the next phase of growth. CEO Jason Southwell sums the industry up in a line:
You are only as good as your last clean.
Jason Southwell, CEO, Smarter Services
His ambition was to know what the last clean looked like while there was still time to act on it.
ChallengeSeven systems and a lot of copying and pasting
The systems themselves were fine. Property Inspect for site audits. Timegate and UHUB for the workforce. Active for HR. HappyFox for tickets. Flexkeeping for housekeeping. RAMS for the fleet of vehicles. Each did its job. The problem was the gaps between them, and those gaps were filled by people flicking between systems. A team in the support centre spent around a day and a half every week logging into all 7, pulling figures into spreadsheets and assembling a PowerPoint that was already a week out of date by the time anyone opened it.
It was always a manual, non-automated process. As soon as the button's pushed, that data's out of date.
Jason Southwell, CEO, Smarter Services
The cost of that showed up in 3 places. Performance against schedule was reported retrospectively, so by the time the numbers were compiled, the moment to intervene had often passed. Right-to-work documentation was cross-checked by hand between the HR system and the compliance records. It's careful work, but the kind that doesn't scale comfortably across a workforce spread over 300 sites. And driver behaviour data sat in its own portal, useful but separate from everything else. None of it was hidden. It was simply spread far enough apart that bringing it together took more effort than it should have.
The business had already explored a fix. An earlier dashboarding project stalled when a vendor's API pricing made it commercially unviable, but the ambition behind it never went away. What Smarter Services wanted was a partner who had solved this problem before.
We knew what we wanted to achieve, but wanted specialist support to accelerate the journey and bring external expertise.
Chris Pullinger, Financial Controller, Smarter Services
SolutionGetting the data right first
In late 2025, Key Capital Partners held an investor dinner on AI. The conversation split the room between people who thought it would change everything and people who thought it would open Pandora's box. Jason wanted something concrete rather than another conversation a year later. A recommendation from an internal employee led to a conversation with Shipshape, and to a readiness assessment that kicked off the engagement.
If the data's not right, the AI isn't right. We cannot afford to make business decisions on inaccurate information.
Chris Pullinger, Financial Controller, Smarter Services
14 weeks later, all 7 sources were landing in one governed environment, with a dashboard on top and the ability to ask questions of the data in plain English. The technical detail is in the panel below, but this is not as important as the changes that followed.
What was connected, and how
Sources: Property Inspect, UHUB, Active, HappyFox, Flexkeeping, Timegate, RAMS Vehicle Tracking.
Build: Automated pipelines into Microsoft Blob Storage, cleansed and reconciled through Snowflake, surfaced in Microsoft Power BI. Claude connected to the governed semantic layer via MCP, read-only and role-scoped, chosen with ISO 27001 in mind.
Reality: Some sources had APIs, some did not, and two turned out to be redundant and were swapped mid-project. That is what many mid-market data estates look like in reality today.
OutcomeThe difference it made
Compliance stopped being a manual reconciliation
Right-to-work status now reconciles overnight between the HR system and the compliance records. Whoever opens a laptop first sees exactly whose documentation is approaching renewal, and deals with it that morning. The cross-checking that used to take hours now happens automatically, before anyone arrives. The timing is important commercially too. From October 2026 the right-to-work regime extends to subcontractor and agency arrangements, which is the operating model most of the sector runs on.
We can see exactly what's due and deal with it the same day. It's the difference between assurance and assumption.
Greg Dingle, COO, Smarter Services
From separate portals to the boardroom
Vehicle compliance and driver behaviour used to mean logging into separate portals and tying together whatever came back. Connected, it becomes a trend you can watch develop, which means patterns can be picked up early and addressed through coaching and support. Driver behaviour has always been managed internally; it is now drawn from vehicle tracking data through the governed layer and included in the monthly board pack, alongside service delivery and workforce compliance.
Smaller things changed too, and they are the ones people notice. Pulling the figures for the weekly service centre newsletter used to be slow going. It now takes minutes, and the numbers are current.
There's still some hands-on work, but it's the exceptions rather than the whole picture.
Greg Dingle, COO, Smarter Services
What gets looked at gets managed
Jason's instruction to the operations team is that the dashboard is the first thing they open each morning, because it tells them what happened yesterday rather than what happened three weeks ago. He is usually interested in the part that is 'red'. Click into it, find what is driving it, make sure somebody owns it. Alongside it, a short automated brief lands in inboxes before the operational day starts, covering workforce compliance, fleet safety and delivery against schedule. It is written in bullet points rather than a link to a chart, so what needs attention is named and ordered rather than left to be spotted.
A dashboard still relies on someone opening it. Now what needs attention reaches the right manager first thing, so the conversation is about the next step rather than about finding the issue.
Jason Southwell, CEO, Smarter Services
Adoption was not the fight it often is. The team took to it, which Chris puts down to a workforce and culture that lean towards a growth mindset, and Jason reinforced by treating the dashboard and the morning brief as operational habits rather than optional extras.
Looking aheadWhat it is worth at board level
If your data isn't clean, you're never going to report with clarity. Now I've got a very clean data set that I'm able to report on at board level.
Jason Southwell, CEO, Smarter Services
Every day since go-live has added to a trend line the business can manage against, set targets from and report on with confidence. The next project is contract intelligence, which involves extracting commercial terms from agreements held in a dozen different formats, so contracted revenue can be measured rather than estimated. That was never possible before, but having the data in order has opened new opportunities right across the organisation.