Every O&M contract makes a promise about time: how fast you respond when something breaks, and how fast you fix it. Those promises — the service level agreement, or SLA — are where facility-management companies most often lose money without noticing. Not because the work was poor, but because the clock was never recorded properly and the penalty is calculated from the client's records instead of yours.
This guide explains how SLAs in Saudi O&M and facility-management contracts usually work, which times to track, how penalties are calculated, and what a system needs to record so the monthly report is a fact rather than a negotiation.
What an SLA in an O&M contract defines
An SLA turns "good service" into numbers. Most O&M contracts define:
- Priority levels — for example emergency, urgent, normal and planned
- Response time per priority — how long until a technician acknowledges the call or arrives on site
- Resolution time per priority — how long until the fault is fixed, or made safe with a temporary repair
- Service hours — whether the clock runs 24/7 or only in working hours for lower priorities
- Penalties or deductions — what happens to the monthly fee when targets are missed
- Reporting — what you must report, how often, and in what format
Read the SLA schedule line by line before the contract starts. Ambiguity — "response" meaning acknowledgement in one clause and arrival in another — becomes a dispute later.
The four timestamps that matter
Every reactive request needs four times recorded, automatically wherever possible:
- Reported — when the client raised it (portal, phone, WhatsApp, email)
- Acknowledged — when your helpdesk accepted it and assigned a priority
- Arrived / responded — when the technician reached the asset
- Resolved — when the fault was fixed and the client was told
Response and resolution performance are calculated from these. If any one of them is typed in later from memory, the report can't be defended.
Priority decides the clock
Priority should be set by rules, not mood. Define what makes a request an emergency — loss of cooling in a critical area, a life-safety system fault, a water leak affecting operations — and apply it consistently. The priority sets which targets apply, so the moment a request is classified, its deadline is known.
Allow priority to be changed, but record who changed it and why. Re-prioritisation is one of the first things a client checks when a penalty is disputed.
Pauses, waiting and parts
Real faults don't always fit the clock. A part has to be ordered; access to a room isn't granted until the next day; the client asks to defer the work. Your contract may allow the clock to pause in some of these cases. If it does:
- Record the pause reason, start and end on the request itself
- Get the client's acknowledgement where the contract requires it
- Separate "made safe" from "fully resolved" if the SLA treats them differently
Without recorded pauses, every delay counts against you.
How penalties are usually calculated
Contracts vary, but deductions are commonly linked to:
- A fixed amount per missed target, by priority
- A percentage of the monthly fee when performance falls below a threshold
- Key performance indicators across the month, such as the share of requests resolved within target
Whatever the formula, the calculation should run from the same records the technicians create, and appear on the monthly invoice as a visible line — not as an unexplained reduction in what the client pays.
The monthly SLA report
A good monthly report answers the client's questions before they ask:
- Requests received, by priority and by building
- Response and resolution performance against target, by priority
- Requests that breached, with the reason and any approved pause
- Repeat faults on the same asset
- PPM compliance for the month, alongside reactive performance
- Deductions applied, and how they were calculated
Produce it from the system, not from a spreadsheet assembled at month end. The fastest way to win an SLA dispute is to show the record of each request.
What software has to do
To run SLAs properly, the system behind the contract should:
- Let clients raise requests through a portal, in Arabic or English, and see their status
- Capture requests from phone, WhatsApp and email into the same queue
- Apply priority rules and start the right clock automatically
- Alert supervisors before a deadline is missed, not after
- Record arrival and resolution from the technician's phone, with photos
- Handle pauses with reasons
- Calculate performance and deductions per contract, and feed them to the monthly invoice
In Odoo, the Helpdesk app supports SLA policies on tickets, and Field Service puts jobs on technicians' phones. For O&M contracts, what we add on top is the contract: its own priorities, targets, service hours, penalty rules, client portal and the monthly SLA report and invoice.
Work with us: see how we build Odoo for facility management and O&M contracts — requests, SLAs, technician jobs and contract billing in one system — or read how to build a PPM plan for an O&M contract.
FAQ
What is the difference between response time and resolution time? Response time measures how quickly you acknowledge or arrive at a fault; resolution time measures how quickly it is fixed. Contracts usually set both, with tighter targets for higher priorities.
Who decides the priority of a request? The contract's priority definitions should decide it, applied by your helpdesk at acknowledgement. Changes to priority should be recorded with a reason.
Can the SLA clock be paused? Only if the contract allows it — for example while waiting for access or client approval. Record every pause with a reason and time, or the delay counts against you.
How should SLA penalties appear on the invoice? As separate, explained lines calculated from the month's records, so the client can see which requests caused each deduction.