Sentinel Custom CAFM Application

A bespoke CAFM platform delivering a complete, 360° approach to Facilities Management.

In 2017, AMPM began reassessing their facilities management technology following growing frustration with their off-the-shelf CAFM software. While the platform had initially supported their digital transformation journey, it quickly became clear that it was no longer fit for purpose.


Managing large-scale contracts across multiple disciplines introduced real-world challenges the software simply couldn’t handle. Performance issues, limited flexibility, poor support, and high annual licensing fees meant the system failed to deliver on AMPM’s wider vision of enhancing service delivery.


Faced with these constraints, the team began asking a different question: what if their CAFM system was built specifically around how they work?

Our approach at a glance

Discover

Redefining facilities management beyond off-the-shelf limits.

Partnered with AMPM (Tetra Group) to uncover the operational challenges of scaling complex service delivery, shaping the vision for a bespoke CAFM platform built around real workflows.

Insight

Designing a platform around real-world operations and processes.

Through deep sector understanding, stakeholder collaboration, and agile development, we translated complex facilities management processes into a scalable, user-focused CAFM solution built for flexibility, performance, and clarity.

Transform

Delivering a smarter, scalable facilities management ecosystem.

Sentinel transformed service delivery with increased efficiency, transparency, and control, reducing operational overheads, eliminating legacy constraints, and enabling AMPM to scale with confidence.

Our impact at a glance

  • Huge improvements to delivery efficiency and overhead costs
  • Transparent UX ensuring customer journey's are clear and concise
  • Vastly reduced operational costs for software licensing and support maintenance compared to previous application
  • Flexibility baked-in to enable support for all scales of Facilities Management from local to national
  • A partnership committed to consistent innovation to ensure AMPM continue to provide market leading services

“In the old system, logging a new job took five or six minutes. Now it literally takes 20 seconds.”

Louis Waldron, Associate Director, Tetra Group

About Sentinel

Sentinel underpins AMPM’s entire service delivery operation, providing at-a-glance visibility across all aspects of facilities management.


The platform supports:


  • 24-hour helpdesk operations
  • Planned and reactive maintenance
  • Cost management and compliance auditing
  • Payment and invoicing workflows


Key functionality at a glance:


  • CRM features for client management, including key contacts, PPM scheduling, and site data
  • Contractor management portal for third-party access and live reporting
  • Quotation engine delivering transparency across new requests
  • Fully featured reporting suite powered by Power BI
  • Custom KPI dashboards configurable to specific requirements
  • Microsoft Azure-hosted infrastructure with failover and 24/7 availability

The Challenge 

For AMPM, commissioning a custom CAFM platform for the first time required confidence in a partner who could guide them through discovery, understand the sector, and deliver best-in-class functionality and design.


Sentinel needed to match the capability of established off-the-shelf platforms while removing the limitations inherent in software not designed around AMPM’s specific workflows, service delivery model, and KPIs.


Bluebox’s proven track record of delivering robust, secure, industry-agnostic platforms gave AMPM confidence that the challenge could be met.

The Solution

Sentinel has become instrumental in AMPM’s continued growth, supporting operational, commercial, and strategic objectives.

Improved transparency across live jobs, quotations, invoicing, and estate management has removed previous uncertainty, with the platform now used by partners across the full delivery spectrum.


Sentinel captures relevant operational data, leverages advanced analytics, and enables powerful reporting and data extraction - helping ensure timely, cost-effective completion of works and delivery against contractual commitments.


The partnership continues to evolve, with Bluebox providing ongoing enhancements and technical insight to keep Sentinel ahead of industry demands.

Microsoft technologies used by Sentinel

The application utilises several Microsoft technologies and we continue to research and develop enhancements utilising the Microsoft stack. 

Cloud-Based Infrastructure

We utilise the Microsoft Azure cloud computing platform to create, deploy, and manage our customers' infrastructure in a more efficient and cost-effective way.

On-Demand Data (Azure SQL)

Azure SQL can easily scale up or down on demand enabling us to efficiently manage customers' workload and application performance.

Automated Failover

Built in disaster recovery features automatically replicate data to secondary geographical regions in the event of an outage to help maintain application availability.

AI Technology

By utilising Azure AI technologies we can provide our customers with advanced capabilities for machine learning, cognitive services, and natural language processing to enhance automation and decision-making processes.

Proactive Security

We implement automated cloud-native security solutions to detect and respond to potential threats to our customers' applications.

Data Protection

Our customers' critical data and workloads are protected through continual cloud based monitoring, backup and restoration.

From our clients perspective

Louis Waldron, Associate Director, Tetra Group

Key discoveries

“The cost. I had certain preconceptions about custom software, but when you factor in the tens of thousands we were spending annually on user licences, Sentinel actually saves us money.”

The collaboration experience

“The camaraderie. Sitting around a table with everyone asking “should it do that?” and having Bluebox say “it can do that instead”. That level of innovation was the most exciting part - you can’t innovate over email.”

Looking forward

“We’ve moved to a subscription model with Bluebox, giving us regular development hours and the flexibility to evolve Sentinel quickly based on customer feedback. It means we can continually improve the experience and have trusted experts on hand to help shape what comes next.”

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