City of Antwerp
How do you manage a cleaning contract for more than 400 buildings? And how can a city make agreements that can actually be monitored? These were the questions the City of Antwerp faced when they launched a tender for a contract management program in the summer of 2019. This is why they chose GRIP.
✓ Clear ✓ Accurate ✓ Control
About the city of Antwerp
The City of Antwerp is the largest city in Belgium by population. Tourists can experience and explore a lot here. With more than 204 km² of land, there are numerous museums, shops, restaurants, and other cultural sites to visit. But Antwerp has more to offer, including daycare centers, public buildings, police stations, municipal offices, and district houses. Currently, the city manages over 400 buildings.
- Location: Antwerp
- Area: 204.5 km2
- Number of buildings: 400
- Number of inhabitants: 529,417
- Number of employees: 7,000 – 8,000
- Case category: cities
Services:
With such a large number of managed buildings, each requiring adequate cleaning, Antwerp sought a user-friendly tool that could not only manage contracts and scale them up or down, but also help them assess the current situation effectively. With GRIP’s contract management and KPI dashboard, Antwerp now has everything needed to maintain a spotless city.
Role Distribution & Digitalization
A city like Antwerp has not only many locations but also many people involved in its facilities. This includes department heads, property managers, and building administrators. The biggest challenge the city faced was the role and authorization distribution among the various facility stakeholders. For example, the authorization for building managers needed to be more limited than for contract managers. It had to be possible for a building manager to submit a request for a quote, which would then be reviewed and approved or rejected by the contract manager. Once this process was complete, the supplier could begin submitting the quote according to the pricing agreements in the contract.
Another challenge was the digitalization of the process: complicated calculations via email and Excel often led to errors in agreements. These calculations had to be converted into automated calculations within the program.
Step-by-Step Implementation Plan
To ease the transition for all the various stakeholders in Antwerp, GRIP helped with an implementation plan consisting of several parts:
- Implementation of calculations to GRIP Facility
- Explanation to the direct stakeholders of the City of Antwerp
- Explanation to the direct stakeholders of Facilicom as the supplier
GRIP Facility was a new product for all involved. With the implementation plan and various explanation sessions on-site in Antwerp, all parties were guided step by step through the program. Additional support could be provided at any time via the support lines.
Control Over a Massive Cleaning Contract
The new way of working may have been a bit of an adjustment, but now, the employees of Antwerp can hardly imagine doing everything through email and Excel anymore. With GRIP, they now have control over their massive cleaning contract, spread across multiple lots.
Not only are all calculations now automatically calculated, but the KPI results for technical quality, tracked by Atir Belgium, Facilicom, and Antwerp, are also logged via the GRIP dashboard. This ensures that performance agreements and finances are always under control.
Improving Together
And our collaboration doesn’t stop there. Antwerp helps itself and GRIP continue to improve through regular evaluations. Furthermore, the next step is already in sight: in the future, the employees of Antwerp want to use a customer service solution for complaints, notifications, and extra requests that can be integrated with GRIP, so that part of the current workflow can be automated.
This will make the work even easier for all involved in the near future.
Want GRIP for Your Cleaning Contracts?
With the various possibilities within GRIP, we offer the full package, and with our excellent service, you too can gain insight into your cleaning. Discover how we can help you.
