Equans is a large technical service provider with activities spread across various regions and disciplines. Victor Groen in ’t Woud works within the Western Netherlands, where he deals with capacity issues for projects within industry and non-residential construction, in the area roughly from Den Helder to Utrecht and Rotterdam.
Those projects can vary considerably in size. Sometimes ten extra people are needed, but for large projects that can rise to around 350. That makes capacity a continuous issue: which people do we have available ourselves, where do we need extra capacity, and what do we see coming our way in the coming months and years?
Victor spent ten years dealing with personnel coordination and planning and now focuses on outsourcing and strategic capacity issues. We spoke with him about how Equans organizes capacity, how planning is developing, and what role Timewax plays in that.
Within the industry, Equans was long seen primarily as a capacity company: a party that could scale up quickly when extra people were needed for large projects. And that can vary significantly: from ten to about 350 extra employees on a single project.
That makes planning more than just putting people on projects.
Project managers look at the capacity they need for their own project and manage based on project margin, among other things. At the organizational level, another question arises at the same time: which of our own employees are available and how do you ensure that you utilize that capacity well before you start hiring externally?
“A project manager might want to hire someone externally because that seems cheaper for his project. But if we have three suitable people available ourselves, you want to weigh that in as well.”
A choice that seems logical for one project may therefore not always be the best choice for the organization as a whole. For that, you need to be able to look further: who is available, what qualifications do people have, and where will demand arise soon?
For years, Equans worked with a self-developed system for personnel coordination and planning. It suited the organization well, but after seventeen years it had been technically overtaken by time. It still ran on Internet Explorer, and security, compliance, and maintenance became increasingly large challenges.
Another Equans entity was already working with Timewax. This allowed the team not only to view the software in a demonstration but, above all, to test it themselves and experience how it worked in practice.
The pricing model also aligned with the dynamics of the organization. The demand for capacity has clear peaks and troughs. In busy periods, more employees are scheduled and costs move up; in quieter periods, they move down again.
The transition itself was relatively straightforward. Data from the old system could be transferred via Excel, so hundreds of employees did not have to be re-entered manually.
Timewax is used within Victor’s region to plan employees and projects and to make available capacity transparent. But that is exactly where Victor now wants to take the next step.
His role is shifting from daily personnel coordination to looking further ahead. Which projects are on the schedule for one or two years from now? What capacity do they require? Where do peaks or gaps arise? And does that mean Equans needs to hire people, expand the flexible shell, or specifically bring in new commercial work?
Together with Timewax, Equans is working on the first reports to get that future picture sharper.
“If you know what's coming in one or two years, you can much more specifically determine when you need to bring in work, when you need to recruit, and when you need your flexible shell.”
It is a development that is still in full swing. Daily planning remains the basis, but the information within it can increasingly help to see earlier which choices are coming up.
In doing so, Victor also looks at the information surrounding the planning. Personnel data, for example, is currently kept in both SAP and Timewax. An integration is technically possible from Timewax and, according to Victor, could eliminate a significant portion of the manual entry work.
Whether and when that integration will happen requires a broader consideration within Equans of investment, priority, and return. Timewax helps Victor, among other things, to make the potential time savings and costs transparent and thus better support the business case internally.
Victor also sees opportunities across regional borders. The different Equans regions now largely work in their own environments. As a result, capacity available elsewhere is not automatically visible to someone planning from the Western Netherlands.
In the long run, broader insight could help to better utilize available people within Equans before scaling up externally. It can also contribute to a more complete national picture of the expected capacity within, for example, industry or non-residential construction.
Meanwhile, experiments are also taking place in daily practice. Equans is already working with Tim, the AI assistant within Timewax. For Victor, the value currently lies mainly in very concrete tasks that normally require multiple actions.
Instead of clicking through the schedule himself, he can, for example, give Tim a command like: ‘Schedule Jan on project X from September 29 to December 31.’
Or vice versa. When Victor recently had to remove a large group of employees from a project, he no longer had to look them up and delete them one by one. He could simply ask Tim to remove everyone from the project in question.
“You don't have to click everything together anymore. You just give the command. That really helps enormously.”
It is precisely in such daily actions that Victor sees the practical value of AI: spending less time processing the schedule and being able to perform more and more work directly from a command.
For Victor, the development of planning within Equans is not about one big change. It is precisely about taking the next step every time: less manual work, connecting information better, and being able to look further ahead with the data already in the schedule.
Timewax grows along with that. Not just as a system in which the daily planning is made, but also by looking together at new reports, possible integrations, and applications of AI. Victor particularly appreciates the practical cooperation: ideas are tested with customers and new possibilities are developed from questions that arise in daily practice.
The final picture doesn’t have to be fixed today. The first task remains very concrete: getting the right people on the right projects. But the better that information is connected and utilized, the sooner Equans can see what is needed next.
