1. How do companies educate their employee base on where this portal is? I imagine this is something that many employees will never use in their entire lifetime at a company.
1b. Isnt is more intuitive for an employee to simply call their helpdesk and report a maintenance issue. Shouldnt the focus of your product be to have help desk employees submit the work request on behalf of Employee A? Since I imagine most employees are just conditioned to call their help desk for any type of issue they have. In which case, now you'll have to compete against competitors like ServiceNow who dominates in help desk software.
Edit:
Please don't take this as me hating on your product. I don't. Quite the opposite. I'm just really fascinated by what your created. Hope you succeed and interested in reading your response.