The SLA Framework Most Portfolios Actually Need
SLA structures fail in two ways: they are either too aspirational to honor or too forgiving to matter. The framework that holds up in residential portfolio operations has five tiers, two timers per tier, and a handful of rules about when the clock runs.
ArkanPM ships with a default priority structure that has survived real operations:
- Emergency — 1-hour response
- Urgent — 4-hour response
- High — 8-hour response
- Medium — 24-hour response
- Low — 48-hour response
These are response targets — the time until a technician acknowledges the work. Resolution targets run in parallel and should be set per category, not per priority alone. A leaking pipe in a resident's ceiling is an Emergency regardless of category; the resolution target, however, is different for a hairline crack versus a burst main.
Why Two Timers Matter
Most teams conflate response and resolution. ArkanPM tracks them independently because they measure different things:
- Response timer — Is someone accountable for this yet? This is the test of routing, assignment, and triage.
- Resolution timer — Is the resident's problem actually solved? This is the test of diagnosis, parts availability, and technician skill.
When you report only on resolution, you hide triage failures. When you report only on response, you hide execution failures. Track both, display both on the dashboard, and hold different teams accountable for each.
Start, Pause, Breach, Complete
Every timer records four timestamps — start, pause, breach, and completion. This is the skeleton of every SLA report worth reading. If your reporting surfaces only "on-time vs. late," you cannot tell a team where to improve. If it surfaces "45 minutes from submission to assignment, 2 hours from assignment to first contact, 6 hours from first contact to completion," you can.
Business Hours: The Setting That Makes or Breaks Residential SLAs
Residential operations have a different clock than commercial operations. A 24-hour Medium SLA that runs continuously means a Friday afternoon submission breaches Saturday afternoon — a Saturday when your office is closed and your technicians are on reduced coverage.
ArkanPM lets each SLA timer operate in business hours mode with configurable business hours per timer. Configure it this way:
- Emergency and Urgent — 24/7 clock. No exceptions. A burst pipe at 2 AM is still an emergency.
- High — 24/7 clock for residential. Residents do not care about your office hours when their air conditioning is out in July.
- Medium and Low — Business hours clock. A broken cabinet hinge does not need to breach at midnight.
This single configuration decision eliminates most of the false-breach noise that teaches teams to ignore SLA alerts.
Pause and Resume: The Honest Version
Work orders legitimately go on hold. Parts are backordered. A resident is unavailable for access. A vendor quote is pending approval. When a work order moves to On Hold, the SLA timer pauses automatically and resumes when work restarts. Total paused duration is tracked separately — you can always see how long the resident waited versus how long the system waited.
The discipline here is managerial, not technical. On Hold is a legitimate state, but it is also a place work orders go to die. Your weekly operations review should include every work order on hold for more than 48 hours, with an accountable reason for each. The system will track the clock; your process has to track the conversations.
Breach Detection and Escalation
Breaches are flagged in real-time with exact breach timestamps. That timestamp is the input to the escalation engine. Escalation rules in ArkanPM can trigger on SLA breaches, lack of response, or stale work orders. Each rule can:
- Notify additional users (a supervisor, a building manager)
- Reassign the work order to a different technician or team
- Bump the escalation level — levels 1, 2, and 3 — with different notification groups per level
Scope rules to buildings, categories, or priorities so the right escalation path fires. An emergency in a luxury residential tower probably escalates to the property director immediately; a Medium-priority cosmetic repair probably escalates to a team lead after one reminder.
Override at the Right Altitude
Defaults are defaults. Override at the category level when a type of work consistently needs a different target — elevator work that cannot realistically resolve in 8 hours should not carry an 8-hour target just because its priority is High. Override at the individual work order level rarely, and only with a documented reason in the comment thread.
The override discipline matters because SLAs lose meaning when they are tuned to be met. An SLA program that reports 99 percent on-time performance with liberal overrides is worse than one that reports 88 percent honestly — because the 99 percent program has stopped measuring anything.
What to Display on the Dashboard
Three metrics, not thirty:
- Response SLA attainment by priority — the leading indicator of triage and routing health
- Resolution SLA attainment by category — the leading indicator of execution and parts health
- Average paused duration — the leading indicator of hold-state discipline
Every other SLA report should be drillable from these three. Resist the urge to build a dashboard that shows everything. A dashboard that shows everything reveals nothing.
The Test
A good SLA framework answers one question on any day of the week: for the residents we serve, are we honoring the commitments we made? When the answer is no, the SLA data should tell you which link in the chain broke — not just that something, somewhere, was late.