You only need a card similar to a credit card to monitor precisely operators’ activity. Thanks to Smartjet, the system that implements SERDATA, the Project system suitably designed for cleaning firms, Geo Servizi warrants to its several yards – more than seventy – a careful service, managing at best quality and profitability.
pPublished on: IL GIORNALE DEI SERVIZI AMBIENTALI - June 2006
Anita Corradi
In Italy the sector of cleaning firms is extremely fragmented in a multitude of very little, little, and medium business being extremely competitive among them.
Profit margins is to the edge of survival and only careful business management allows to combine at best competitiveness, quality of service and profitability.
A cleaning firm, exactly like in a manufacturing company, can be no more managed according to general principles and its state of health cannot be measured only on the basis of quantity of stipulated contracts. As, if figures have their weights, all that counts are figures allowing to have a complete and precise vision of all parameters concurring to determine the business budget.
In a service company every element is important – workers, work hours, intervention frequency, material and equipment cost, consumption, lying goods, general expenses, amortization and so on.
Business management
So, a careful business management must refer to accurate and precise budgets, allowing to keep under control the situation and the state of health of company.
This is the idea of Paolo Fasoli, copartner of Geo Servizi, an integrated service company situated in Verona that, for dimensions and effectiveness, can be considered a symbol of multitude of little and medium company, constituting the connective tissue of this sector.
Geo Servizi, having one hundred workers scattered in seventy yards, is operative since 1992 and it works in an area extending from the urban ambit to the regional one and covering several sectors, as civil, industrial, and hospital cleaning, supermarkets and trading centres, ordinary and extraordinary cleaning, surface and treatement of façades and surfaces.
“Every day we are engaged in about seventy yards – Paolo Fasoli explains – and this is a considerable logistic engagement, as we have to satisfy needs of a very diversified custom whom we have to warrant quality of service, punctuality in interventions, steadiness of supplying.
Operational staff is composed by teams, whose, as for maintenance interventions, workers are for the greater part women, working part-time and carrying out civil cleaning, with morning and night shift, and full-time workers specialized in extraordinary cleaning.
“Our activity must to be managed very carefully as fragmentation is so high that the slightest carelessness can cause the loss of control of costs of each yards”.
Intervention of IT
To avoid this risk, Paolo Fasoli equipped himself, since 1998, with a tool allowing to monitor globally all the activity, taking into consideration all variables involved.
It is SERDATA, the software created by Project, Italian company situated in Brescia being the first to develop an information pack especially designed for cleaning firms.
SERDATA is composed by four modules, perfectly integrated among them and working also separately and it allows to manage attendance staff, to draw up financial budgets and accurate estimations, to plan supplying and to update the situation of yard consumptions and lying goods, as well as to manage invoicing, to keep under control vehicles and equipments, to estimate current situations and to plan new tenders, to personalize company forms.
“SERDATA – Paolo Fasoli confirms – is efficacious for the control of managing costs, as it carries out yard budget analysis and highlights sites where they are working well and those that are less profitable. It supplies both situation of each yard and global situation and it allows to verify the profitability of each worker yard by yard. It is very important for us to have this picture updated in real time. At the end of the year, drawing up final balances and estimations, we can estimate which yard is to maintain and which, on the contrary, is to eliminate due to its unproductiveness. Besides, SERDATA is increasable, too. We utilize it already since much time and last year we combined another programme allowing to draw up balances, starting from the analysis of each yard. It is a book-keeping programme that interacts with programmes already inserted, and so we can monitor the trend of the company both from the operational point of view and the financial one”.
Modularity of SERDATA is one of the characteristics constituting its value added, as it allows to Project to implement its potentiality according to operators’ more and more demanding needs.
Reduction of costs
Smartjet was borne in this way. It implements and increases the module concerning attendance staff. Thanks to this module, in fact the company can manage the assignment of departments and working hours to each worker. Inserting data of workers and yards, hours and working days, SERDATA develops monthly data inserted, dividing festivities, working and holiday overtime, managing exceptional situations, as absences, and giving the final result of the end of the month. It allows also the daily, weekly and monthly analysis of hours expected for contracted services.
Thanks to Smartjet the management of attendances on yards is furtherly improved, as it reduces not only by 70% working time of bookkeeping department, but it also allows to count with the most precision working hours actually carried out in each yard.
Smartjet is a combined system, composed by a card similar to a credit card and readers placed on each yard and one connected to company computer. Smartcards are provided to workers.
Smartcard reader, autonomous and fed by a lihtium battery with the duration of two years. You set up it easily, as you hang it on the wall fixing it by biadhesive tape. When the operator enter the yard, he passes the smartcard on the reader, so that date, hour and yard are saved. At the end of work, the operator passes again his smartcard on the reader to save the end of his service. Data will be then downloaded on the reader of smartcard connected to the company computer. All these data automatically are transmitted to SERDATA.
“With this system - Paolo Fasoli explains – we have furtherly improved our management, as each day we have the real situation of attendances and so we can calculate by minute effective costs of staff. For a company like ours, having as main expense item the work cost, the control of this type of cost is very important, as it allows us to get scale economy being advantage of the activity”.
