How Oelfke's phone now rings only half as often as before.

Challenge

‍Gebäudereinigung Oelfke GmbH, a traditional building cleaning company focusing on maintenance cleaning, was founded in December 2013. Today, about 50 cleaners work daily for the company. Kristina Schroeder from Gebäudereinigung Oelfke GmbH understands the challenges in the daily operations of building cleaning services: "The biggest challenge for us as a cleaning service is ensuring that the property to be cleaned and the cleaner are well-matched. Not every employee is suitable for every assignment," explains Kristina Schroeder. Additionally, communication between clients and employees can often lead to misunderstandings: "Sometimes a client might want only the right side cleaned, which can sometimes be miscommunicated to the responsible employee," describes Kristina Schroeder.

Another challenge is the complex scheduling. Since the cleaners are constantly moving from one site to another, it's crucial that assignments are efficiently planned, schedules are quickly communicated to the employees, and can be flexibly adjusted in case of absences. "We used to work with Excel spreadsheets," recalls Kristina Schroeder. "It was like a school timetable. We would enter the streets of the job sites and note how much time the employees have. If someone was a substitute or sick, we had to rewrite all the plans, print them anew, and distribute them to the respective employees."

As an innovative cleaning company, Gebäudereinigung Oelfke GmbH thus began looking for digital alternatives early on to facilitate their daily operations. "Eventually, I found a software solution. But we quickly realized: it didn't work at all as we had imagined. There were too many errors and it was too cumbersome in terms of evaluation possibilities. It just didn't work," shares Kristina Schroeder. Therefore, Gebäudereinigung Oelfke GmbH and Kristina Schroeder decided to quickly end this collaboration and look for another software solution.

Solution

‍The accurate and automatic evaluation of working hours was crucial for Kristina Schroeder when deciding on a new software solution. When she discovered the all-in-one software solution from PlanD, she was particularly struck by the software's excellent evaluation capabilities as well as the intelligent scheduling, mobile time tracking via the PlanD app, and hour evaluation through digital time sheets. Since the beginning of the year, Gebäudereinigung Oelfke GmbH has been using PlanD and can now handle everything from digital duty scheduling and time tracking to payroll processing all in one system – saving time, stress, and paper.

Thanks to PlanD's intelligent scheduler, cumbersome and time-consuming Excel spreadsheets are now a thing of the past. Employees receive their schedules in real-time via the PlanD app and can access them from anywhere. Kristina Schroeder can also quickly react to substitutions and reschedule employees based on their qualifications and capacities. Moreover, she can easily store information for each individual job, ensuring her employees are well-informed for each assignment. Cleaners can also upload service catalogs, documents, and photos for their respective jobs on-site through the document upload feature. Quality control has never been easier.

Results

‍Since using PlanD, Kristina Schroeder now has more time to focus on the essentials: "Thanks to PlanD, my phone rings only half as often as before. Because I just don't have to send as much. All the important info for each job and each substitution is simply stored in the app." The digitization of the schedules and time sheets also provides more free time for Kristina and her employees to focus on other tasks. Not least because of PlanD, the Bremen Chamber of Crafts described the level of digitization at Gebäudereinigung Oelfke GmbH during a recent visit as "excellent."

The response from the employees is also positive: "Our employees like that the app is visually simpler and more appealing than our previous software solution and generally offers them much more possibilities. They can upload all important documents easily in the app and always have an overview of their working hours and hours worked. Before, they always sent their photos via various communication channels. That was always laborious and unclear." For Gebäudereinigung Oelfke GmbH and Kristina Schroeder, digitalization with PlanD has primarily resulted in huge time savings and greater simplicity in daily work. "It runs like clockwork," summarizes Kristina Schroeder, "and at the end of the day, we also save tons of paper. It doesn't get any better than this."