"I am a huge believer in partnerships in which you raise the bar together"

John Adegeest, IT Director at cleaning company CSU, on the benefits of ORTEC Workforce Scheduling (ORTEC WS)

John Adegeest has been IT director at cleaning company CSU (and its sister organization Tzorg) since August 2017. Upon entering the company, he was tasked with setting up a new IT strategy. “We started later on that year and changed and updated everything we could, from the lowest levels of infrastructure up to applications, including our scheduling and time tracking system. At first, our approach was ‘cloud, unless’. Now, we’ve moved to cloud only. It was a deliberate choice, because I believed my team could do more than just keep the IT department running. I wanted to utilize their knowledge and capabilities to add value to the business. This year, we will laying the final pieces of the transition puzzle.”

It’s an impressive achievement, especially in a market that has not yet embraced digitization. “Our market is modernizing”, Adegeest admits, “but cleaning will require manual labor for a long time to come. Still, you can make various peripheral processes a lot more efficient with technological solutions on the one hand and with evolving cleaning agents on the other. We are increasingly being awarded adjacent services as well, seeing as we’re on-site anyway. For example, we recently won a contract to clean and refill coffee machines at 2,300 branches of Jacobs Douwe Egberts, which they used to do themselves. A similar case: printers. And for RET, we top up liquids in their trams and buses, simply because we’re cleaning the vehicles anyway and performing an extra check is easily done. As long as our employees don’t have to actually service the equipment, they can handle these tasks just fine.”

“Cleaning will require manual labor for a long time to come, but you can make various peripheral processes a lot more efficient.”

Elite achievement

CSU, originally a family business, is entirely Dutch. It employs around 16,500 cleaners, in addition to approximately 700 office workers. The company has 14 branches across the country and serves a hugely diverse customer base: from hotels and vacation parks to event venues, soccer stadiums, transport companies, police and the armed services. Adegeest: “We work in places where security and screening are very important and in which the requirements are quite different from, say, in an office building. And we also clean meat-processing plants. You can't put everyone everywhere, and not everyone wants to be work everywhere. Cleaning a few hundred homes at vacation parks on changeover days between 9:30 in the morning and 3 in the afternoon: it really is an elite achievement." And so is creating a schedule for a company where 90% of employees almost never come to the office, but work at our clients’ premises.

Scheduling in advance

“Workforce planning: if we didn’t get that right, we wouldn’t make any money at CSU”, says Adegeest. In the early days of the transition, one of the first things we replaced was the HR system, including workforce administration and payroll. Soon after, we realized that replacing the time-tracking system would be a smart move. Back then, we logged our hours retroactively, which immediately makes it impossible to optimize your scheduling and make your organization smarter. Besides, we had no way to create a schedule for entire company with one and the same system. What’s more, we struggled to demonstrate compliance in various areas, such as working hours. If you don’t find out that someone has worked too much until after the fact, you’re too late. To solve these issues, we started looking for the right system. At one point, I could choose between two alternatives, but I trusted what ORTEC showed me. ORTEC WS (ORTEC Workforce Scheduling) just had the most comprehensive features, and functionality is what matters: I’m glad we went this route.”

Time left

Time left Scheduling is now a cinch at CSU. “Our regional managers are responsible for about 100 employees. In the past, they would each create a schedule their own way, either in Excel or just by heart. We had no insight at the central level. Now, regional managers create a schedule in ORTEC WS in advance. They had to get used to it at first, but with this approach we can help them optimize schedules from HQ. The system has also made it a lot easier to source free capacity from elsewhere if you’re struggling make everything fit. Time tracking and processing used to take us about 4 to 6 hours a week, but because we now create our schedules in advance and keep a neat record of any exceptions that occur during the week, we can open ORTEC WS at the kitchen table on Friday afternoon, enter some final exceptions and press the button.
It’s become a 15-minute job, leaving us with a lot more time to spend on clients or employees.”

“ORTEC WS automates a bunch of things, saving time and money.”

Preventing fines

CSU does not believe in automation as a way to save money, the IT director explains, but sees it as a way to improve quality and facilitate growth. However, there is no denying the savings that the cleaning company has managed to achieve with its digital transformation. “If you work in the Food unit, there are certain rules for overtime and for the compensation you have to pay after a certain amount of overtime. At first, we had to keep track of everything by hand and mistakes were made. ORTEC WS does it all automatically, saving time and money. In the old situation, if there was any doubt, we would take the employee’s side. It was the right thing to do, but it also cost the company EUR 60,000 a year for two Food units, which is a lot of money to save. We didn’t have to do anything apart from configure ORTEC WS to run properly. The system also helps prevent violations, thus reducing the risk of fines."

“A much more comprehensive, well-organized system lets you analyze information, deploy your workforce, identify patterns and make predictions.”

Welcome Home

Ultimately, CSU wants to give cleaners real-time insight into their own schedules, Adegeest says. "We also want to start using other features. Managers should be able to offer shifts to groups of employees that meet certain requirements, which anyone looking for extra work can then accept. At the moment, we still have to grab a list of cleaners, start from the top and keep calling until we get a yes. With our new approach, employees will have more control over their shifts. I don’t believe our company will transition to self-scheduling any time soon, because some of our employees aren’t as digitally savvy as others. However, we’ve been working on setting up a new company for some time, where we will use self-scheduling to allow employees to schedule their leave digitally.” The rollout of ORTEC WS at CSU is now about 80% complete, with the final two business units being completed before December 2021. Welcome Home is also set to start using ORTEC WS later this year. One of ORTEC's employees wrote his final thesis on CSU's scheduling in hotels. "That study covered the situation before ORTEC WS, and although there was a lot wrong with the data, he was still able to draw some conclusions. You can imagine what we’ll be able to do with a much more comprehensive, well-organized system: analyze information, deploy our workforce, identify patterns and make predictions.”

“I’ve found that ORTEC is eager to explore new ways to improve and innovate the services it provides to us together. It’s a very valuable situation.”

Partnership

ORTEC is also supporting CSU in various initiatives, such as levelling out the workforce utilization rate and creating a dashboard to show the carbon footprint of the services provided to each client. And the two partners are in constant dialogue about platform innovations that will create value for clients and for the platform altogether. “I am a huge believer in partnerships in which you raise the bar together”, Adegeest begins. “In our dealings with ORTEC, we have always appreciated how openly they communicate, including the development teams. What can we do, what can we not do and why does this have added value for you? I realize that developments take time, but that doesn't matter. We’re in it for the long haul. As long as you stay in touch and keep agreeing on the way forward, honestly talking about each other’s expectations. What’s more, I’ve found that ORTEC is eager to explore new ways to improve and innovate the services it provides to us together. It’s a very valuable situation. Especially now, with our Welcome Home initiative. It’s a platform with a completely different dynamic, but I’m confident that we’ll succeed, because we have such a good relationship.”