'We continue to automate processes'

Caterer Hutten wants to contribute to people's happiness. With culinary craftsmanship and genuine hospitality. All business processes must support that mission. By using AFAS' ERP software as its central system, the organisation has made great strides in that area.

Employees are called 'collaborators' at Hutten. The company was founded to make people happy. Not only patrons, guests and patients, but also society and, of course, the 'collaborators' themselves. They put their shoulders to the wheel every day in pursuit of their shared vision: creating value together for a better future.

To do that as well as possible, it is important that in the background all administrative business processes are automated in one ERP system. Since 2017, Hutten has been bringing that under AFAS. Demand manager Tom van der Laan looks back on this change. "For our company, ICT was a necessary evil at the time. We are very good at hospitality, organising events and making sure guests get healthy and tasty food. But ICT is necessary for that at the back end. At that time, we had developed many applications in-house. Really bespoke."

This had created a landscape with as many as 80 different applications. Van der Laan: "Those applications were mostly outdated and required a lot of manual work. As a result, our foundation was not strong enough to cope with growth. So we created a 5-year roadmap: how are we going to reduce 80 applications with a lot of customisation to a minimum so that a stable foundation is created?"

With AFAS, Hutten went back to one integrated ERP system for all administrative business processes: from CRM to financial accounting, from HRM to recruitment. Van der Laan: "For all those primary processes, we were working with the best separate systems. In the new situation, the bigger picture would deliver more than the sum of its parts."

What this transition brings? Van der Laan: "It brings our collaborators a lot of ease of use and speed in their administrative operations. They do a lot of core activities in one and the same system. Before, we had a lot of Excel sheets tied together. That was inefficient and led to different data. Now we have one version of the truth."

And that in turn leads to new insights on which Hutten can steer in a targeted way. Data analyst Caspar van Thiel explains: "Working with AFAS enables us to collect more and easier data. We then use that data as management information. The basis is in place, now we can go further. Data-driven working is one of the pillars in our IT strategy."

Two of the six 'collaborators' of the complete management department focus entirely on the management and optimisation of AFAS. "They work closely with our key-users. The key-users represent a large constituency and pick up the net with requests for functional management."

Hutten looks ahead. "For instance, we want to take a hit with the intake and onboarding of new staff. How do we attract and retain new employees? Streamlined HR processes can contribute to this. Another example is that we want to bind itinerant staff to us even faster. After the interview, we want to have the signed contract within an hour, so to speak, so they can start as early as tomorrow." 

An at least as big ambition is that AFAS will help Hutten even more to be a sustainable and inclusive corporate caterer. The company wants to be climate-positive by 2030, is making healthy eating a spearhead and is committed to social equality. "We see opportunities to use AFAS to monitor sustainability in our own company in a standardised way," says Frank Dobbelsteen, Manager Strategy & Sustainability. "That way we get to know ourselves better in that area and see where we can improve. Also on a human level. We find it important that our organisation consists of people with different backgrounds, preferences, ideas and beliefs. Sustainability, diversity, inclusion: AFAS as a source of information can help us take steps on those themes. Whatever the ambition is, AFAS is the resource that supports us in doing so."