Time and personnel registration by Wil Pijnenburg, Campina

A fact is a fact: in the Netherlands, more articles with the oval green Campina Iogo are scanned at store cash registers than from any other brand, and as a dairy producer the brand is also making strong advances in Belgium, Germany, Poland, the United Kingdom, China, Japan, Russia and Ukraine, among other countries. The group as it currently exists historically grew from the merger of a large number of small dairy cooperatives, where dairy farmers jointly process and sell their milk. Those fragmented origins were also refl ected in the personnel management: each plant in the Campina Group had its own system, with a central department which processed all of this information in a URS system on an old and expensive mainframe computer. A report from the management consulting fi rm McKinsey at the end of the 1990´s made it clear that a centralised rather than a decentralised time registration could save a number of FTE´s (fuIltime equivalents). “Campina in the Netherlands was in the first instance looking for a time registration system for the plants, i.e. the milk production plants”, recalls Wil Pijnenburg. “Only later was it decided to also add the production plants of the Cheese & Butter group, the offi ces and the Industrial Products group in Veghel. In that period, around 2004, I arrived in the central payroll accounting department and I became a bit the contact person for everything which had to do with Protime. Currently I´m the sole application manager at the central level, but I´ve been training someone who over a number of years will be able to take over from me.”

Harmonisation

The major challenge for Protime resided precisely in that decentralised character of the company. “The objective was to fully harmonise the time registration. Wherever work is done, Protime is used. Period. Because whatever time registration you may have had in the past, at the headquarters the manager still had to give his approval to what comes out of the system. ProTeam offered us a chance to break with that. The ProTeamer - in most cases the department heads, certainly in the production plants - manages his people, he gives his approval and that´s it, apart from a couple of audit tasks of local key users. The Dairy CBA, which includes all kinds of surcharges - is one of the most difficult in the Netherlands, but with Protime´s standard solution it works.” Above all, Wil Pijnenburg can´t stress the word ´standard´ enough. “Campina wanted zero customisation, because that is precisely what we wanted to get away from. Because then you get problems with new releases and so on, for which even more customisation becomes necessary. Thanks to Protime, everything was finally structured: everyone went to work according to the same structure.”

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• Campina