Description

One of Anago’s clients is a medium-size accountancy office that focuses on entrepreneurs within the sector of small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs), free professionals and non-profit institutions. The office works with more than thousand clients and has over 100 employees. In order to adjust the needs of the clients to the availability of the employees, a specific planning is required in which the hours of employees are assigned to certain activities and clients. This planning is based on a copy of the planning of the previous year. All of the modifications (new clients and employees, different needs and changes with regard to meetings and presence) are processed within the same file.

State of Art

In order to make this planning, a spreadsheet was used which was partly filled with information from the Navision ERP system. The use of the spreadsheet technology has led to the following bottlenecks:

• The activity level is not included in the planning
• The current view is one-sided; alternative perspectives (i.e. perspectives from clients and employees) are lacking
• The processing of change requests from both clients and employees is time consuming error-prone.
• The spreadsheet allows only one user at the time 
• It is not possible to provide a decentralised view of the planning

The office wanted to professionalise the planning and support it with a tool that would effectively address the above mentioned bottlenecks and expand the existing functionalities.

Migration

De office has investigated the possibilities of replacement, but this investigation showed that none of the standard systems met the requirements. Above all, because the implementation as a traditionally programmed customised solution turned out to be too costly and too rigid. Therefore, the solution was provided by Anago: A customised system based on software assembly.

Anago solution

During two workshops the required functionality was discussed, thereby taking the original spreadsheet and the list with bottlenecks as a starting point. Besides the functionality also the user-process and the related issue of authorisation have been described.

The Anago application contains the following functions:

• Automatic connection with the ERP system in order to collect information of clients- and employees
• Management of activities, authorisation and scenarios
• Importation of needs per activity, function and client
• Weekly planning and periodical planning  
• Rescheduling
• Reports with overviews of the planning, capacity and bottlenecks

Furthermore, the Anago solution naturally provides a number of required functionalities:  exporting to Excel and pdf; data importation; turning and tilting of tables; logging of changes in the data; back-up; authorisation and connections with different systems.

Profit

A rolling planning has been introduced in the Anago application, which facilitates a weekly automatic update (instead of an annual update that has to be processed manually). Also, extra dimensions have been added to the dimension, which facilitates planning on activity level. By clicking on a specific cell, the underlying detail level will appear in a pop-up. The office can now view the planning from both a client- and employee perspective, which makes it easier to process requests from clients and employees.


In case of a reschedule from the side of the employees, already planned activities can be easily adapted. Besides, should a client request a reschedule, all planned employees can be shifted at the same time. Furthermore, a tool has been developed to add periodical appointments and absence. The users can simultaneously add schedules to the system at a central level. Special reports, then, provide the project managers with insights on their clients at a decentralised level.

Would you like to know more about this specific client case or about the implementation of customised application using Anago Assemble? Contact Thomas de Nooij telephonically under the following number +31 (0)30 657 2613, or through e-mail: tdnooij@anago.nl.