Gluu

nyhedsbrev-billede(da)

CASE STUDY

Bülow Management A/S: Gluu helps us to grow and makes our consulting even more holistic

By using the process platform Gluu, Bülow Management A/S has increased its turnover from process improvement and is now working even more holistically to help its customers improve their businesses.

With Gluu, all the good thoughts during a process mapping workshop can now be fully integrated into the tasks of each individual employee, so that “best practice” always is followed. At the same time, the processes are now carried out at the customer’s premises, creating new opportunities for future system consultants at Bülow Management A/S.

How can a management consultancy ensure that their advice is fully integrated into the client’s daily operations once a project ends?

Bülow Management A/S faced this challenge, among other things, when working companies in the construction industry. The construction industry is already under severe price pressure. Therefore, even a few projects gone wrong could seriously impact a company’s overall financial results.

Together with the client’s key employees, Bülow maps and streamlines the customer’s entire value chain – from bidding to final delivery. However, it is one thing to prepare a process, have all the instructions, and regular tasks in place. Another is to ensure that it is put into practice at the customer’s workplace.

“This has been one of the big challenges in the past,” says Jan Wittrup, CEO of Bülow Management A/S, which helps companies ensure an effective coherence between strategy, management, employees, processes, and results.

The good processes stayed in the flow charts

“We found that once we had completed a thorough process mapping phase, it created a deep insight into how work should be done. It also made the company’s staff very motivated to work on new processes. But the new processes remained an abstraction. The new processes ended up as beautiful flowcharts out in the offices on the construction site, and then nothing more happened since it all had to be implemented manually and in the form of paper documents,”

says Jan Wittrup.

Therefore, when presented with Gluu’s process platform, there was only one option for Bülow Management A/S. Not only does Gluu make it easier to outline all work processes, role owners, and create a management overview. It also ensures that each client project’s deliverables are fully integrated into the customer’s operations, once the consultancy work is over.

With Gluu as a digital tool, Bülow and the customer can ensure that the best practice is executed to the letter every time – not just during the offer phase, but also on the construction site, where instructions and tasks can be accessed and checked off via the Gluu Execute app on a smartphone. Jan Wittrup says:

“By having the processes on iPads, tablets, and smartphones, employee’s find it easier to work in accordance with the company’s standard. It is highly effective and I have only met the natural change-related educational barriers to put it into use. It is very easy for the company as it is dynamic, simple, and accessible to ensure that all processes are followed to the letter.”

Faster work creates challenges

However, Gluu has also created challenges for Bülow Management A/S: “We make our money from consultancy and delivery – e.g. process mapping. However, since all the work is now done considerably faster with Gluu, it has also become much cheaper for our customers. Therefore, we also need to deliver more than in the past to create enough volume.”

The challenge, however, is afforded:Since Gluu is so accessible, visualisable and cheap, we now find that even very small businesses are well-founded to process mapping. At the same time, large companies map far more processes than in the past because it has become so manageable and executable. And last but not least, we find that our customers recommend others in the industry to make use of Gluu and of our process consultancy. This is, of course, the best indicator that we and Gluu really make a difference” says Jan Wittrup.

Changed requirements for future employees

Digitalization also changes the recruitment processes: “We have in the past primarily hired strategy and management consultants because this is what our customers have demanded. But now that we are going to scale up next year – partly because of Gluu – we are now looking for system consultants – preferably with a financial or IT background that can complement our strategic competences,” says Jan Wittrup.

This has already happened this summer.

Gluu has also had a positive side-effect on the recruitment processes:

“for me in the future to be able to hire candidates with excellent advisory competencies an essential prerequisite is that I am able to offer digitalisation tools. Earlier the work was a heavy administrative process of having to go home and transcribe a large number of interviews. Today everything is happening at the client’s workplace. This causes the work to be far more exciting and knowledge demanding.”

The tasks are thus solved faster, and at the same time, Gluu makes it easier for Bülow Management A/S to work as Jan Wittrup prefers: “Companies should be seen as a whole, where competences, culture, and management are linked to the processes.With a tool like Gluu, it is now much easier for me to deliver the total package into the companies. And it has become much more accessible and affordable for the customer at all levels to work with and integrate the processes into daily work.”