Centea

Centea is a medium-sized banking establishment with a traditional services portfolio aimed in particular at private individuals. There are 650 employees at the main office in Antwerp who support a network of 800 independent agents.
"Until 2000, all FM services were handled jointly by the Materials Planning & Buildings department and the Logistics & Purchasing department. This duplicate operating approach reduced efficiency and eroded the level of service provision."

Channelling information effectively
Coordinating all FM processes within Centea, the Centre now receives every report, request, reservation, order and complaint. Internal customers (personnel) and the external customers (the independent agents) benefit from this single central point of contact.

"In addition to fielding all the requests, the FM Coordination Centre supervises the various FM teams and the Purchasing department, freeing up FM services to concentrate on their core business."

Singing from the same song book
"The next step after this reorganisation in 2001 was to find software to support our FM processes. During the selection procedure, we immediately liked the look of Planon because its philosophy matched ours: a single point of contact (helpdesk) where the instructions (work orders) could be automatically generated
and tracked as necessary. Quite rightly, Planon also pays a lot of attention to the interface: always the same structure, making it recognisable and user-friendly.

Tailored to meet our needs
"In the meantime, we have tuned the Planon modules Reservations, Helpdesk and Work Orders to suit our processes. The integration with Lotus Notes, for example, was very important at Centea. In the long term, we want to manage our printing, maintenance planning, contracts and key management using Planon."

Careful Planning is invaluable
"During implementation, the danger is that people are in a hurry. With hindsight, it’s evident that careful planning and a structured introduction of the Planon software are indispensable. We used the Planon Implementation Method to organise and monitor the structure and the planning properly."