Gijs Viester has been the owner of ICT company Vindicta together with Koen Los for three years. Vindicta specializes in setting up, optimizing and managing office automation (mostly) in the cloud. They mainly do this for SMEs and large SMEs in the center of the country. There are always nice exceptions that confirm the rule.
Before Gijs became a co-owner, he worked as a consultant for 15 years and was responsible for planning and projects within the company. “We have actually always been looking for a good planning tool”, says Gijs, “because planning at Vindicta has always been a challenge with multiple ways of how our calendars got booked!”
Vindicta’s consultants usually work for several clients at the same time. There are recurring customer visits, projects that can be booked and, in addition, own calendars for internal and external meetings. “That difference presents quite a challenge in planning projects and even in scheduling appointments”.
Gijs was always responsible for planning. As the team grew, planning became more and more challenging and over time he used many different tools. “We started with Excel and we experimented with different planning tools such as Float. But in the end we always ran into the same limitation: double bookings because none of the tools could integrate with our Outlook calendars”.
For example, a project was booked or a recurring customer appointment, while someone had already made an appointment in their Outlook calendar. This led to double appointments, which not only caused stress internally, but sometimes also for customers.
In 2019, Vindicta again started looking for a planning tool. The main selection criterion for the tool was a 2-way sync with our Outlook calendar and the only tool that came up was Timewax. “A demo from Aukje made it clear that Timewax could indeed do what we were looking for and during a Proof of Concept in 2020, Timewax worked perfectly and the tool did exactly what we wanted”.
“The Timewax integration with Exact Online was also an advantage: every project is placed in Exact Online and the integration with Timewax means we can immediately make bookings for those projects”.
“In addition, I often interacted with the support department, both about technical challenges and at project level. Then I always get a critical look at my questions and support provides different methods to make better use of Timewax. Thinking critically along with us in this way and suggesting alternative methods, that is exactly what we expect from our partners and how we work with our own customers.”
“In the previous way of working, planning was really stressful”. For example, the consultants had duplicate customer appointments that had to be rescheduled. “By scheduling with Timewax, our calendars are clearer. This gives us the peace of mind to complete our tasks properly and deliver better quality”.
In addition, Vindicta now works more with reports such as the project budget overview. “Project management has become a lot easier as a result,” says Gijs, “because we can now see in advance of a project how many hours it has been sold for, how many hours have actually been booked in and therefore how many hours are still available to complete it”.
On the one hand Timewax makes the calendars for consultants clearer and on the other hand it gives the planner insight into the utilization and the capacity that is still available. “That saves a lot of time and gives us room to look at the bigger picture, for example: what about the capacity? Which projects can be dropped and what impact will this have on the planning in the coming period?”
“With such insights into our organization, we can now look further ahead, to six months or a year. As a result, we can build on our planning and do more work – that makes Timewax an extremely important tool”.
“In the future, we want to use Timewax to gain even more insight into our organization and business operations”. Vindicta has been using the tool for about 3 years now, but in the beginning they only used limited functionality. But, “now we have our planning in order and we are working on making our utilization rate more transparent,” explains Gijs. Finally, there are always opportunities for improvement, for example with our “Outlook calendars and the projects we link to and in the security field by using Timewax Single Sign On – so there is always something that we can organize even more conveniently”.
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