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.

In 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!