A simple solution to expensive problems
Below you see Filip. Filip is a busy man who coordinates all the practicalities of delivering food and kitchen staff to festivals, concerts and city festivals in Denmark. He is the Event and Festival Director at On Grass Solutions, which is part of Denmark’s largest supplier for these types of events, Food Family Group.
Until recently, it wasn’t unusual for Filip to spend half an hour registering the attendance of the crew that showed up to make the kitchen run like clockwork at a festival or major concert.
And those are expensive minutes when profit margins are as small as they are in the hospitality industry. Especially when you work with young people on short-term contracts and it’s normal for 10% of the crew to be absent on the day.
Filip also spent a lot of time recording the details of the people his team had recruited for the summer events. Names, phone numbers, email addresses and salary information were entered into an Excel spreadsheet, and after each event, Filip entered the individual’s hours and sent the sheet to the payroll office. He also spent time keeping track of all the information he exchanged with his employees and colleagues via messenger, text message, phone calls, email and various documents in a loosely managed file archive.
It wasn’t that Filip didn’t think it could be done in a smarter way. But how do you even get started on a project that can make everyday life easier – but which, in a busy day, is a lot of work to manage?
A chance meeting between a colleague and her friend was the turning point. The colleague’s friend had eight interns in IT and change management who needed a project.
Over the next two months, Filip shared his daily challenges and the consulting team developed a solution.
Today, Filip and his colleagues have a much better overview of internal planning, collaboration and sharing of documents and information. And much of the manual work has been automated.
At the same time, Food Family Group has an app that facilitates communication with the many summer helpers and makes it much easier to plan shifts and share information about the various events. And the half hour Filip used to spend registering attendees has been shortened to five minutes, allowing the team to spend more time being productive in the kitchen. Hourly information is automatically saved when an employee checks out again at the end of the workday.
On top of that, Filip got help to implement the changes in the company. The company is primarily made up of people who would rather spend time on practical tasks in the kitchen and field than in front of a computer. With clearly formulated step-by-step guides and other materials, he can easily hand over the new workflows to his colleagues. Especially the new ones who start up each season.
“The collaboration has not only solved some very concrete and expensive problems. I’ve also gained a whole new lens through which to look at our other workflows. I think much more about whether some tasks can be automated, whether the physical bulletin board can be put online, whether a workflow can be solved more efficiently. And it has shown me that change doesn’t have to come from management, but can also come from the people with their hands in the dough,” says Filip, who is now looking forward to the season starting in May and really feeling the results of the fall project.
