Bosman Hotel Services guarantees authenticated cleaners and error-free invoicing
Combined commercial and technical services in the hotel-cleaning also deliver flawless payroll processing
Hotels that work with Bosman Hotel Services can always rely on the facilities service-provider guaranteeing authenticated cleaners and error-free billing at the keenest net prices. Bosman also handles its staff’s wages correctly and accurately. All as a result of implementing the time-registration and access control modules in the Kronos Efficient software package.
Bosman Hotel Services specialises in cleaning hotels. The services provided by Bosman range from cleaning toilets, rooms and windows to specialised floor-cleaning and keeping restaurants, stairwells and conferences rooms in tiptop condition – the full cleaning package, in fact.
Bosman employs between 500 and 700 staff, with the numbers varying from season to season and often from day to day, depending on the occupancy rates at hotels. The organisation has its own Head of Housekeeping at each establishment, who operates as a hotel manager to coordinate cleaning activities on site. Bosman currently works for 25 hotels, including major household names such as Ibis, Dorint, Marriott, Renaissance and so on. Most of the hotels the company works for are located in the area around Amsterdam Schiphol airport. Bosman leads the cleaning services market in Amsterdam and is the third-largest operator in this sector in the country.
Bosman: from small to large, from subcontracting to in-house management
The company was founded in 1971 by former director and owner, Wim Bosman. Originally, the business focused on hotels in the Eindhoven area. Subsequently, Bosman extended its activities systematically across the whole of the Netherlands by subcontracting to other cleaning providers, although Bosman retained final control and responsibility.
Up until 2005 Bosman operated as a sort of facilities services broker, working in conjunction with 25 partner businesses. At that time, the company only had about a dozen people on its own payroll, with its provider partners employing a workforce of about 600.
Then, in 2005, John van Keulen and a business partner acquired the company. They decided to stop subcontracting their cleaning activities and bring everything in under their own management. As a result, all of the workers employed by Bosman’s provider partners were transferred to the Bosman payroll. The company then began looking for a workforce management system capable of making the new business situation run as efficiently as possible.
Lookalikes and fingerprints
Interestingly, though, the original reason why Bosman went knocking at Kronos’s door was not for a staff planning system or to automate its time-registration. “Initially, we were looking for software capable of guaranteeing us watertight access control,” explains John van Keulen, the current director of Bosman. What has gradually happened in the facilities management sector over the years is that a whole range of nationalities have come to be employed, which has also resulted in a problem with illegal workers. In fact, Bosman often had to contend with staff posing as other people in the hotels in Amsterdam. John van Keulen outlines the situation: “At Bosman, we work with almost a hundred different nationalities. We regularly had cases where people would attempt to access a hotel using the access security pass belonging to someone else working for one of our partner companies, with whom he or she had particular similarities.”
To guarantee worker legitimacy as much as possible, Bosman sent its hotel managers on document recognition courses, where they learnt to examine residency permits and passports from various countries in order to assess their authenticity (use of inks, signatures, watermarks, etc.). Bosman also introduced equipment capable of checking digital photos and then sending them through automatically to the hotel manager in question when a new employee started work.
In the beginning, the hotel managers always checked the newcomers carefully. “That always worked fine in the early days,” explains van Keulen. “But after that, these checks became significantly less stringent. And when 60-odd people in a cleaning crew arrive all at once in the morning, you want to get them working as quickly as possible. Carrying out these close-scrutiny checks as the cleaners came in meant an enormous amount of time – and hence money – was being lost for us and our workers.”
While the existing system was far from conclusive, Bosman still had to guarantee that ‘illegals’ would be unable to slip through the system and find work. So the company went looking for an electronic access control system combined with fingerprint recognition. After an extensive search on the Internet, Bosman found what it was looking for at Kronos. And after a demonstration of the system at a customer, the company was won over by the features and attributes of the Efficient software.
Authenticated cleaners, flawless payroll processing and error-free billing
When they started work, all new employees were still required to present their passport. Over time, Bosman also developed a very close working relationship with the border control police for checking these documents. Now, every Bosman Hotel Services employee has a security pass that is linked to the fingerprints of two or three of his or her fingers.
Access control systems were also installed in the offices of the hotel managers. So when employees start their working day, they had to have their security pass and fingerprints checked by the control system. This method of authentication had an immediate impact on productivity.
Since then, all fraudulent use has ceased. “Our customers find the system highly reliable,” says van Keulen. “Recently, one of our customers was inspected by the border control police and no discrepancies at all were found. This, of course, makes us feel very good. We also know that if there is any further deceitful use, it won’t be an error in a defective system, but a case of enuine intentional fraud.”
Previously, staff time-registration was checked on a sample basis by Bosman, using time-boards and stopwatches. To a very large extent, wages were based on the honesty and loyalty of staff, which meant that everything did not always run as accurately as it might. In addition to the access control system, Bosman now uses the Kronos Efficient time-registration system.
Which means that the access control system also functions as a time-registration system. This way, the company is able to pay its workers based on the number of hours actually worked. It can also keep a close eye on exactly how many rooms/areas at the hotel have been cleaned, which eliminates disputes. “Hours worked are then automatically passed on to Unit 4, our payroll system, which enables us to pay out staff with no errors,” says van Keulen.
How did staff take to the change in system? “In the beginning, they were hard to convince, but now they think it’s great,” he says. “Efficient generates a summary of the hours they actually work each day, which they are given with their wages documents. That way they can check to make sure their pay details add up properly. Because they realise that their fingerprints have been taken to avoid fraud, they also don’t mind that any more either.”
Error-free pay also means error-free billing. The monitoring tools in the Kronos Efficient system help eliminate any discussion about whether hours have been worked or not. They also enable Bosman Hotel Services to offer customers the best possible prices. Johan van Keulen explains: “We can check the net performance for each employee. We start by analysing the start and end times of the shift, and then deduct the travel time – how long it takes workers to go from the registration terminals to the rooms they have to clean – and break times. Dividing this by the number of rooms cleans gives us the net result for their performance. If we do this exercise for three months with each employee, we get a pretty good picture of their net performance. For us, the system means greater productivity, while for our customers, it means that we can charge them the net price based on our data.”
On a hotel-by-hotel basis, by having an effective time-registration system, Bosman is able to analyse actual performance. Which means that the company has better insight for defining its margins. This then helps Bosman in its negotiations with new customers, because it can call up actual facts and figures. “We can talk about a commercial and technical ‘uniqueness’,” says van Keulen. “Efficient enables us to offer our customers pure measurements, reporting and invoicing. So they are never over-charged. It also means we are able pay our workers on the basis of actual time worked. All of which are USPs that set us clearly apart from our competitors and they have certainly not done us any harm.”
What will the future bring?
Bosman Hotel Services is happy with the system it has implemented, as it is tailored to requirements and also takes account of the complexity of the various CLAs the company has to deal with. Bosman began talking with Kronos at the beginning of 2005 and the access control component first went live at the Dorint hotel at Schiphol at the end of 2005. Since then, all of the other hotels have been equipped with the system and Bosman also switched to Kronos for time-registration, followed by the link to the payroll processing system. The whole process was monitored and fine-tuned for an extended period by a Kronos employee and is now fully up and running.
However Bosman Hotel Services is not yet using the Kronos Efficient system for its staff planning, preferring to use its own software for the time being, although there is certainly room for improvement. Bosman is currently considering whether to introduce the planning module in the future. “Because we have a great many hotels at Schiphol in our customer portfolio, hotels may suddenly become fully booked with stranded travellers at any given moment. Unexpected weather, delays caused by technical problems to aircraft, strikes and so on mean that these hotels can suddenly be completely full. This means that our service has to be extremely versatile,” concludes John van Keulen.
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