The Précon Group provides expertise in the field of quality management, organizational development, food safety and labelling. They offer interim or consultancy solutions to the customer, but they also provide training to train companies in this, for example.
Leona van Duivenvoorde is a planner at the Précon Group. “For the first seven years I was a consultant myself, so I was deployed to all kinds of companies. I have been a planner within Précon Group for the past three years and I handle all requests that come in through sales and assign them to our consultants. I look at who we can schedule to those assignments and I coordinate the planning with the customers.”
“We have recently started using the Timewax software for our planning process. Our company has grown considerably in recent years. At a certain point, the methods we used in the past were no longer sufficient. In the long run it became too time-consuming to continue working according to the old processes.”
“When I first arrived at Précon, an Excel sheet was shared every week. At that time we were also a lot smaller than now, so it was still workable then. We now have approximately one hundred consultants. In the meantime, we have made a switch from that Excel sheet to a CRM package Archie, which was officially not built for planning. As an addition, an extra module was built into that package so that we could still schedule resources.”
“However, with a hundred consultants that was actually no longer workable. In addition, it took too much time and we at Précon felt that we had too little insight into the processes. You could see who was working where. but you couldn’t actually link anything else to relevant analyses. Something that is now possible with Timewax.”
“We switched to AFAS in November 2022. At first, AFAS seemed to meet all our requirements, but on closer inspection their planning feature was too minimal. These experiences led us to a specific wish list for new planning software. It had to be a partner of AFAS, so that all updates in the planning software were also visible. In addition, it had to have a 2-way integration with Outlook. That’s how we ultimately ended up with Timewax.”
“This turned out to be a golden opportunity. Not only were we able to exchange data between Timewax and AFAS, Timewax also gave us insight into the planning at a much more detailed level. The planning feature in AFAS was too minimal for our organization. However, the shortcomings were completely made up for with the many options and insights of the Timewax application.”
“Another important condition was that our consultants were given responsibility for their own planning and did not need us as planners for every eventuality. This was made possible with the 2-way integration with Outlook that Timewax offers.”
As a consultancy firm, we are very dependent on the mobility of our consultants. Due to the good integration with systems such as AFAS and Outlook, Timewax provides a good overview of the planning and real-time insight into the changes. Both the consultants and the planner know immediately whether anything has changed.
“We now have much better insight into what the billable time is at the moment and in the future. This way we now know better what turnover we can expect. The insights into time ensure that budgeted costs can be checked in quotes and that staff can be planned more accurately.”
“To give an example of this: If we had scheduled a consultant for five days according to the quotation, but during the assignment we planned more than those five days, we can see this directly in Timewax.” This can immediately be a signal. Maybe we need to talk to the customer, because we agreed on five days and we are now planning day six.”
“The impact of Timewax is therefore mainly that the business processes have become a lot more transparent and that these processes have been made more efficient.”
“In the future, we want to take even more steps in these analyzes as a company. For example, I previously talked about the analyzes of the quotes. What quote was made? What have we earned from the project? Are we not going over our price and if so why? The power of Timewax is that you can not only perform these types of analyzes but also provide very targeted detail in those analyses. For example: which customers approach us? Which projects do we deal with the most?
We want to use these types of analyzes much better in the future. With Timewax these new insights are now possible.”
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