Three kinds of worker. One job list.

21:40, a fault report from a residential block: the entrance area is dirty and there is a viewing first thing tomorrow. Today what happens is this. Someone calls, someone writes it down, someone dispatches in the morning, and eventually a van sets off.

With three kinds of worker on the same job list, something else happens. An agent takes the report, asks the follow-up questions, qualifies it and opens the job. A cleaning robot already in the building runs the floor overnight. Whatever is left, because a threshold is in the way or a surface needs wet work, goes to a person on the early shift with a photo, a location and a remaining scope.

None of that is a forecast. Each of the three pieces exists on its own. What is missing is the job list that runs them together.

Field service software models a person, a vehicle and a time slot. It dispatches, tracks, manages assets and bills. Y Combinator describes exactly that as the state of the art in its Request for Startups, and points out that these industries spend ten to a hundred times more on labour than on software.

A robot does not fit that data model. It has no travel time, it has a charge curve. It does not call in sick, it enters a fault state. It works for nothing at night and gets in the way during the day. And it can finish a job 70 percent of the way, which in a staffing plan is an undefined state.

The real work is not in the assignment, it is in the handover. A job a robot half finishes has to arrive in the world as a partial result: what is done, what is not, why not, and what the person finishing it needs to bring.

That makes the fallback path the actual product. A system that only models the success case creates more coordination than it removes. We specify the handover first and the autonomy second.

The moment people and machines use the same floor, this stops being an operational question and becomes an evidence question. Driverless industrial trucks and autonomous mobile robots fall under ISO 3691-4, listed in the EU Official Journal since May 2024. It is a type C standard, and personnel detection is rated to performance level d under ISO 13849.

Above it sits Regulation (EU) 2023/1230 on machinery. It was published on 29 June 2023 and applies from 20 January 2027 in place of Directive 2006/42/EC. Machines placed on the market before that date keep grandfathering. For an operator the practical consequence is simple: the question of who uses which floor when, and how that is documented, gets answered now rather than in 2027.

Two standards not to confuse with it: ISO 10218 was revised in 2025 and covers industrial robots. ISO 13482 covers robots in physical contact with a person. Both are routinely quoted for machines they do not apply to.

Robot uptime is the wrong metric. A machine can be 99 percent available and complete nothing, because the door was shut, the lift was busy or the floor was blocked. The number that matters to an operation is completed jobs per shift, regardless of who completed them.

There is no industry standard for that, and we do not claim to own one. What we do is write down what counts as a completed job, per site, before the first machine moves, so that afterwards the argument is about the result and not about the measurement.

Whoever runs physical work produces the record of how that work actually happens. No model vendor and no robot manufacturer has that record. It is the reason operators are structurally better placed in this shift than it first looks.

That is not unconditional. As soon as wearables, cameras or location tracking touch employees, German law makes it a codetermination matter: section 87(1)(6) of the Works Constitution Act covers technical systems capable of monitoring behaviour or performance, and the GDPR applies regardless. Bringing the works council in after the pilot means running the pilot twice.

werob is a systems integrator, not a software house with an autonomous dispatcher in market. What exists is the chain in front of it: a specification derived from a plain-language description, hardware selection across more than 44 manufacturers, integration into the systems you already run, and a cockpit that makes the deployment visible.

That is enough to change a process without replacing your system landscape. An operation that wants to start next quarter does not need a platform decision. It needs one clean task, a fallback path and a floor.