It’s a piece of cake for Van Dijk Banket

It’s a piece of cake for Van Dijk Banket

With passion and love for the craft, Van Dijk Banket bakes delicious cakes, biscuits and chocolate. The bakery works with traditional methods but produces on a large scale. With a close-knit team of 90 employees, the company supplies first-class pastries to many large supermarket chains at home and abroad. Over coffee and a biscuit, we talked to Hermien Mulder and Jeroen Koeling about their experiences with Dyflexis. Hermien is responsible for HR policy at Van Dijk Banket.

She handles personnel management, staff scheduling, health and safety, and training. After more than twelve years of service, she knows the company inside out. Her colleague Jeroen Koeling is responsible for monitoring and steering key business processes. With a “to measure is to know” mindset, he keeps a close eye on production costs. Staff costs are an important part of that.

That’s why Jeroen also deals a lot with Van Dijk Banket’s staff. For the past two years, Hermien and Jeroen have used Dyflexis to do their jobs well.

Challenges

More than 60 employees work in the large halls next to Van Dijk Banket’s head office. They work on one of the four production lines where mergpijpen, mokka ladies, cakes and biscuits are made. Scheduling all these employees flexibly while keeping staff costs under control is quite a challenge for Hermien and Jeroen. This is partly due to the high pressure they work under.

Jeroen explains: “It’s very hectic. I recognize that from my previous job. If something went wrong there, someone pressed a button and everything stopped, but you can’t do that here. The biscuits can’t stay in the oven.” Finding a balance between the right staffing levels and staff costs is therefore essential for Van Dijk Banket.

“We used to spend at least a day and a half on the schedule.”

The schedule for the production staff used to be made in Excel. Hermien wasn’t very happy with that: “We used to spend at least a day and a half on the schedule.” This was mainly because everything had to be entered by hand. “In Excel, you make mistakes quite often: it’s very easy to schedule someone twice or forget someone,” Hermien explains.

On top of that, working hours were tracked on paper timesheets, which were then typed into the computer by hand. That also took a lot of time and often led to mistakes. “I spent two and a half days on the schedule and the hours,” says Hermien. Because scheduling and time registration didn’t run smoothly, it was hard for Jeroen to keep a close eye on staff costs.

Solutions

They went looking for a system that matched what Hermien and Jeroen needed. On the one hand, the system had to take work off Hermien’s hands. On the other, it had to give Jeroen more insight into staff costs. Searching online, they found Dyflexis. After a demo, one of the directors was immediately enthusiastic. He wanted to start with the new system as soon as possible. “Yesterday rather than today,” says Hermien.

“It lets me see the scheduled and worked hours per production line.”

Today, Dyflexis is used intensively for scheduling and time registration. Because the system is so user-friendly, Hermien has handed part of her tasks to one of the team leaders. He is now responsible for making the schedule in Dyflexis. This lets Hermien take a steering role and leaves her more time for other tasks.

Employees now register their own hours with a time clock system. The team leaders approve or reject the hours first, after which Hermien only needs to give the final tick. That way she can delegate certain tasks while keeping sight of the time registration. Jeroen, meanwhile, has gained much more insight into staff costs and has the tools to adjust course.

He uses the management reports in Dyflexis to analyze staff costs. “It lets me see the scheduled and worked hours per production line,” he says.

Results

The results are nothing short of astonishing. Hermien used to spend a day and a half a week on the schedule. That’s a thing of the past, she says: “We now spend about six hours a week on scheduling.” The time she spends on time registration has also dropped considerably. That used to take her a whole day, but now she hardly spends any time on it: “It’s down to half an hour a week.”

Part of the time savings comes from the fact that leave requests can now be made online. According to Hermien, that saves a lot of time: “People no longer have to stand at my desk to ask if they can have time off.”

“We now spend about six hours a week on scheduling”

Jeroen can also pull a lot of interesting data from the system, which he uses to steer processes. Dyflexis shows him, for example, which people are best to schedule: “We used to sometimes put an operator on the line as a packer, but now the message is: ‘Don’t put those expensive people on the line.’” With this insight, he can adjust the budgets in Dyflexis and avoid high costs next time.

“We used to sometimes put an operator on the line as a packer, but now the message is: ‘Don’t put those expensive people on the line.’

Both Hermien and Jeroen are also very pleased with how user-friendly the system is. About the management reports, Jeroen says: “It’s click, click, click and you see it. It’s very logically built!”

Nothing standing in the way

With Dyflexis, scheduling and time registration have become a piece of cake. On the one hand, it saves Hermien a lot of time; on the other, it gives Jeroen more insight into staff costs. That way they can keep the schedule flexible while staying in control of staff costs. In other words, nothing stands in the way of Van Dijk Banket continuing to do what it does best: making delicious pastries. Hermien Mulder & Jeroen Koeling

Van Dijk Banket