Berendsen, founded in 1920 under the name Sunlight Services, is the UK division of the Elis Group, which operates across 28 countries. Berendsen offers laundry services to the hotel and healthcare sectors, and provide workwear services to many companies. They count the NHS, Premier Inn and and Pret a Manger among their clients.
We were approached by Berendsen in 2009, and tasked with creating a customer portal for their Hotel Linen Division. The primary business goal was to replace an existing paper-based form, which was manually filled in by the customer then typed up into Microsoft Dynamics at a later time.
This clunky workflow slowed down the processing of laundry each day while a stack of unwieldy paperwork was typed up, and it was obvious that an automated solution was required to increase efficiency and reduce overheads and resource requirements.
We built, maintain and continuously develop the Berendsen Connect customer portal, which allows customers to login and manage their linen delivery and pickups online. The customer can login to the portal to enter their linen details before the delivery takes place. The customer can also view their delivery notes online and choose a PDF version (rather than waiting for a paper copy to be posted).
To save having to count every item to be returned for laundry, hotels can set-up rooms (with a number of items per room), to easily fill out their requirements by selecting only the rooms that have been changed. The Connect Portal has been further expanded to include other linen services and expanded out to cover the Workwear Division.
The service desk allows Berendsen account manages to handle customer queries, including setting tasks for specific individuals. Each customer is issued an SLA for dealing with requests, which are displayed and handled by Service Desk. The software also incorporates comprehensive reporting tools based on customers, sites, users and timescales.
Work with UsWe delivered a extensive workwear management portal, allowing Berendsen workwear customers to manage their accounts online, and feeding data back to Berendsen in realtime. Functionality includes size exchanges, garment replacements, addition of employees, wardrobe management (garment collections) and budgets.
Work with usRather than requesting a paper copy of a delivery note, customers can view delivery notes online. These are made available as soon as the delivery is ready, so the customer can check what will be delivered before the driver leaves the depot. This has led to savings in both paper and postage and time required to print and send these to the customer.
Work with usIn almost ten years of collaboration with Berendsen, we’ve delivered a broad selection of productivity tools and web apps for employees and customers alike, all benefitting from a program of continuous development and improvement. The Berendsen Connect portal has had a measurable impact in reducing Berendsen’s costs and increasing profitability, and the client was thrilled with the result. We’re looking forward to another ten years!
One of the reasons we went with Orian was the school meals management system - while we already had our own payment system, the facility for children and their families to also choose meals in advance online was a huge bonus. Everyone really loves it - it’s so easy to use. All in all, we’ve seen increased meal numbers, improved service delivery and cost savings.