FloraHolland

Interview with Bart Wijnen, Tim Holtkamp and Joeri Keevel

In 2009, FloraHolland underwent a large-scale reorganization. The HR department had to become more efficient and everything had to be digitalized. However, the department wanted to stay customer friendly. They achieved this with TOPdesk.

FloraHolland’s flower auction in Aalsmeer is the largest trade building in the world. The one million square metre hall complex (the equivalent of 165 football fields) sees the sale of 20 million flowers every morning. Trucks full of gerberas, tulips, roses and countless other types of flowers are constantly coming and going, making the auction hall resemble a beehive of colourful trolleys.

In the ‘Anemone’ room, Tim Holtkamp, Joeri Keevel and Bart Wijnen tell us about setting up the HR Service Centre (HSC) during the reorganization.

HR needs to be more efficient

“We needed to work more efficiently,” explains Bart Wijnen, the HSC project leader. “Two years ago, six large flower auctions were brought together under the name FloraHolland. Harmonizing all these branches is hard work.”

A part of this harmonization was the reorganization of the HR department. “Before, each branch had its own HR desk and employees, and its own variations on the staff policies,” says Wijnen.

The decision was made to set up a central HR department in Aalsmeer. “We needed a service management tool to help us move everything to a single location,” explains Tim Holtkamp, application manager at the HR department. “We didn’t have to think long before choosing TOPdesk. Other packages were incredibly large and expensive. TOPdesk is a flexible tool with lots of possibilities, and it’s not too complex.”

All questions, requests and comments are processed in one central location. As a result, the HR department is able to maintain a better overview. “HR has been streamlined and the HR process is easier to grasp. For instance, if TOPdesk shows us that there are a lot of questions regarding the pension policy, we can publish a newsletter on the subject,” explains helpdesk employee Joeri Keevel.

The change

Setting up a single HR Service Centre was a six-part process. “Implementing TOPdesk went very smoothly,” says Tim Holtkamp. This was partly due to the fact that the IT department was already using TOPdesk. “TOPdesk was already familiar with how our organization works, so we could latch on to the processes that had been established for IT.”

This does not mean that the HR team could simply copy the processes written for the IT department, says Bart Wijnen. “HR is a very broad field, and the questions we receive are not as easy to categorize as a report about a broken printer. You can’t treat them as standard requests.” Because of this, the HSC processes all questions and forwards them to the correct persons.

Clear to everyone

Team leaders pass the incidents on to their department. “The employees can see the status of their incident in the Self Service Desk, which is accessible via the HR portal,” explains Tim Holtkamp. “We used authorizations and roles to ensure that employees are not able to change requests themselves. They can’t access everything, but they do stay informed.”