Finding the optimal schedule for Albron and its employees

Albron is passionate about food service and creating memorable experiences whenever, wherever: whether you’re studying or on the go, out shopping or receiving care. By 2025, it aims to have 250,000 guests enjoy its delicious food and beverages every day.
In pursuit of its lofty goal, Albron has adopted ORTEC Workforce Scheduling, ORTEC Team Scheduler and Management Self Service to meet all its staff scheduling needs. The organization has also embraced the ORTEC Optimizer, maximizing the distribution of available capacity across hospitality outlets and increasing employee engagement thanks to the "My Albron app" with schedule information and company news.

“Every site had its own planning, based solely on internal insights. This led to regular understaffing or forced us to deploy expensive temporary workers.”

Improving the scheduling and timesheet approval process

Albron’s all-round food-service activities take place at a vast number of outlets spread across the country. And yet it lacked a central system and a uniform planning, scheduling and timesheet approval realization, along with the suspicion that more could be done with its available capacity. Desirée Knook, Planning Manager at Albron explains: “Every site had its own planning, based solely on internal insights. They had no information about staff availability at other sites, which led to regular understaffing or forced us to deploy expensive temporary workers, while other employees complained that they didn’t have enough work to keep them busy.”

One of Albron’s other challenges was fostering employee engagement, which had been a struggle in view of the high level of dispersion. On top of that, their time-tracking and timesheet approval process was poorly automated, forcing managers to jump through various hoops to get everyone paid.

“Now we have insight into overall capacity, the quality of our schedules has improved tremendously.”

Optimal schedules with the ORTEC Optimizer

Faced with all these challenges, Albron set out to find a solution. “We took our search seriously and drew up an RFI-RFP document, followed by an extensive supplier selection process”, Desirée Knook explains. "We were looking for a user-friendly system that could give us more insight and control over the scheduling, planning and timesheet approval process. We came across ORTEC along the way and immediately saw the potential of the ORTEC Optimizer after a series of demos.”
By implementing the ORTEC Optimizer, Albron has been able to adopt a central scheduling system supported by smart algorithms. Desirée Knook: “Now we have insight into overall capacity, the quality of our schedules has improved tremendously. As a knock-on effect, site managers are now more visible because they spend less time on the scheduling process, benefiting both our employees and our customers.”

Higher employee engagement

Albron also launched the My Albron app, which gives employees access to their personal schedules and the latest news from the organization. While the app was developed on the ORTEC Relevance platform, it was fully personalized and adapted to Albron’s own corporate identity. Albron's HR Director Christiane de Jong played a major role in the rollout and explains: “The app has fueled a surge in employee engagement. Not only do they have direct access to the latest developments and news, but they can also actively participate in the scheduling process, e.g. by setting their own availability preferences. They can also use the app as timesheet, after which the system automatically calculates their pay following a simple approval step by the manager.

Finding the optimal schedule for Albron and its employees

Thanks to the ORTEC Optimizer, employees are deployed more efficiently and have a bigger say into their working hours, improving their work-life balance. Employees eager to work more hours can easily update their preferences in the app. The entire scheduling, time-tracking and payrolling process has now been automated, minimizing the risk of errors. Desirée Knook: "The ORTEC Optimizer is a powerful scheduling tool, while the My Albron app effectively integrates the scheduling process with communication capabilities and even gives employees control over their personal schedules.”

“Persevere and stick to the process and start communicating and involving the entire organization on time.”

Lessons learned

Desirée Knook would be the first to admit that there were plenty of challenges during the implementation phase: “Introducing the Optimizer and the app marked an organizational sea change. Our main lessons learned were to persevere and stick to the process and start communicating and involving the entire organization on time. We also realized the importance of taking the time to make gradual improvements - we’re still in the process of fine-tuning our internal processes.
Christiane de Jong adds: “ORTEC was incredibly professional throughout the entire process. Their consultants had ample domain knowledge and were very capable at translating sticking points into workable solutions for our organization.”