Submitting A Service Request

For a facilities emergency, please call us:
207-786-6449: Daytime or 207-786-6254: After hours or weekends

For non-emergencies, our preferred communication method is via website, text or e-mail.  Calling in non-emergency work requests is less efficient and can result in miscommunication.

Text-to-Work Order

  • Scan this QR code to add the Work Order Line as a Contact in your phone:
  • Text your work order request to the number including any pictures, videos, emojis, or whatever else. Please include the following important information:
    • Your full name
    • The building and room number (If outside, what is it near?)
    • A brief description of what the issue is
  • You will receive a response from our Work Control office letting you know we received your request and to ask you if we need any additional details to get the issue resolved.

If you have an Environmental Health and Safety concern we encourage you to contact the EHS office.

Students may also contact the Housing office for assistance with any Housing related issues.

Click below to begin a non-emergency work request

Submit a work request online
Information on Submitting a New Request

Facility Services Work Management Process

Facility Services has taken steps to better organize our work order system and to provide enhanced customer communication with the Bates Community. Our mission is to make the Bates campus a comfortable, safe, and aesthetically attractive place to learn, live, work, and play. We rely on the campus community to let us know when something breaks, needs repair or attention, or otherwise impacts our mission. We want to hear from you!

Website: You may submit a service request online through the link above. This is the best way to request a work order and will result in the best communication for you as a customer. You will get an email when you submit a request, when it is turned into a work order, and when that work order is completed.

E-mail: You may email us at facility-work-request@groups.bates.edu. This address is monitored by multiple people. When you submit a work order via e-mail you will receive two emails, one when your work order is created, and one when your work order is completed. It’s better to send an email to this address as opposed to a specific employee in the Facility Services office. If the individual you email is unavailable for any reason your email may go unnoticed or unread. Using the work request address will ensure that we can log and process your request in a systematic and timely fashion. Automated email messages will come from this e-mail address. Feel free to respond with questions, to ask for updates, or to let us know any feedback you might have.

Please be sure to include the building name and specific location (floor, room number, etc) with the details of your request.

In person: You may always stop into our offices on the second floor of Cutten Maintenance Center at 147 Russell St. We’d be happy to help you with your request.

We are comprehensively tracking work that goes into maintaining our campus in an effort to collect data on a building-by-building and asset-by-asset basis that will help inform decision making for maintenance and future investment. This means we are recording the hours we work, the materials we use, and the services we contract out, and entering those costs in our Enterprise Asset Management application, IBM Maximo.

Once we have received your request, our administrative office will review it to make sure we have all of the information we need to route your request to the right shop for completion. If we are missing something critical you will receive either a phone call or an email asking for clarification or additional details.

With sufficient information, we will approve your request and turn it into a work order. Work orders are routed to one of our four shops (Carpentry, Mechanical, Grounds, or Custodial) to be completed within the approximate time frame determined by the assigned priority level. A chart of our priority levels can be viewed here. We process an average of 50 work orders every day. Any given shop, and any given employee, is working on multiple work orders with varying priorities at any given time. Using our experience and the context of the information we receive from you, our customers, we assign a priority level to the work.

If at any point in the process you have questions or updates about your work request, please contact Facility Services through email or phone call and we will be happy to give you a status update.

Once work in the field has been completed we update the work order to show the specific work accomplished and the timeline. The work order is then marked complete, which triggers an email notification to the submitter. If you receive this email and the work is not done yet or done satisfactorily, reply to this email and let us know. We will either explain why it was closed out, or re-address the issue, if necessary.  Upon receipt of the completion notification, customers can click on a link in the e-mail to complete a short survey to tell us how we did in completing the requested work. We ask that you please take the time to complete the survey and give us your feedback.