Making sure everything is up and running requires planning, and to plan efficiently you need as much information about what’s going on as possible. How many people are coming in? What kind of activities will they engage in? How many need catering? How much cleaning staff do you need?
If you don’t know that, your operational costs will soar and the experience of coming to the office becomes worse. But it doesn’t have to be like that.
az Sint-Blasius started using Planner to handle their catering, resource and meeting room booking years ago, but the big change came when they started using the Planner Outlook plugin to get a much tighter connection between meetings, room reservations and resource bookings.
We sat down with Didier Windey, Facilities Coordinator at az Sint-Blasius, to talk about what they’ve gained from using Planner to handle their meeting rooms and resources and how the Outlook plugin has helped change the way they work.
Planner lets az Sint-Blasius structure their work in a much better way.
The ability to plan in advance is a big part of ensuring smooth facility operations. After all, if you don’t know what’s going to happen, how are you going to make sure you can provide the right services?
When we started our conversation with Didier, one of the first things he noted was that Planner had helped him and his team structure their work in a much better way.
He explained how, before implementing Planner, the chefs would sometimes experience showing up in the morning, to see that they had to cater an event for 50 people, and because the order hadn’t come in until that morning they would have almost no time to prepare for it.
Obviously situations like this caused a lot of stress for the catering staff.
But those days are over.
Because the users schedule events in Planner in advance, and Didier’s team has easy access to that information, they can see upcoming events and begin their preparations sooner.
As an added bonus, the automated reports has ended up saving the team a lot of time.
“If the reports wasn't automated like this, I would need one employee spending four or five hours a day just to consolidate the information.” - Didier Windey, Facilities Coordinator at az Sint-Blasius.
This has let them become much more proactive in their facility management work, and they are now a part of the planning process for larger events.
“After we’ve started using the Planner plugin for Outlook we actually never have any production problems or staffing problems anymore.” - Didier Windey, Facilities Coordinator at az Sint-Blasius.
az Sint-Blasius has reduced their resource waste by more than 20%
In a time where many budgets are being reduced every cent matters. And that is no different for a hospital like az Sint-Blasius.
When we asked Didier how Planner has helped reduce their budget spend, he explained how one of the problems they had before they began using the Outlook plugin was that meetings and catering orders weren’t updated after they had been placed.
If a meeting was moved or canceled, the initial catering order was still in effect.
This led to situations where a meeting had catering for 20 people but only five showed up, or worse, no one showed up at all so both the food and the meeting room would go to waste.
“Because of the connection with Outlook, if a meeting is canceled for example, the booked resources are also canceled. So with using the software the way it is supposed to be used, we have more resources available because we have less waste. This has reduced our food and resource waste by more than 20%” - Didier Windey, Facilities Coordinator at az Sint-Blasius.
Ready to see how Planner can help you?
It’s one thing to hear about all the ways it helps, but it’s quite another to see it in action. Check out the video below to see how Planner works.