Managing Director, Wieland Gebäudereinigung GmbH
Martin Wieland runs Wieland Gebäudereinigung, a commercial cleaning company. Together with ibx he moved his business off paper notes, spreadsheets and chat groups and onto a platform of its own. We spoke to him about the road there, the doubts beforehand and what has changed day to day. This interview is a translation of the German original.
We are a commercial cleaning company with around 150 staff and about 1,000 customers, and our people are out at very different sites every day. A normal day means planning assignments, allocating staff, keeping an eye on hours, collecting records and talking to customers. All of it at the same time. That is exactly where it quickly gets hard to keep track.
Honestly, like constant stress. The organising was spread across chat groups, spreadsheets, paper notes and phone calls. Every single question cost time and patience: who is working where, how many hours has someone done, where is that particular record. And we were paying for a whole set of separate programs that could not be combined. For every little thing I drove to the office to look something up, or quickly rang my daughter to ask. Today I have everything on every device, in real time. The funny thing is that my people out on site have become half office workers themselves, because everyone simply does their part digitally on the spot.
There was no single moment, it was the sum of them. When you are still piecing hours together in the evening instead of finishing for the day, and you start the next morning by working out where things even stand, then you know: technology is supposed to take work off me, not create more of it. I came across ibx completely by chance. I met Michel at the checkout while shopping, we were standing in the queue together and were only messing about at first. At some point we got onto artificial intelligence and what could be automated with it in future. I was hooked straight away and wanted to know more.
I did look at off-the-shelf software, but there my business was always supposed to adapt to the program, not the other way round. And we work the way we work, that cannot be pressed into a standard template. With Michel it went the other way round: he first looked at what our day actually looks like, and the solution followed from that. For me as a practical person, that was the point where it made sense.
Very much as partners. It was not sell and disappear, it was genuine listening. We built it step by step, I could always say what was still missing in daily use, and it got done. You can tell that someone understands how a business ticks, not just how software works. Michel pointed out a lot of things that could be improved off his own bat, brought sensible rules into the system and kept suggesting features to round the whole thing off. He simply thinks along with you, and that was genuinely enjoyable.
Everything runs in one place. I plan assignments from start to finish and each one has a clear status. Staff record their hours straight on their phone, with no paper, and the office immediately has all the information and figures. The customer signs the job sheet directly on the phone. Documents and records file themselves. Leave, payslips, evidence photos, the team chat, it is all in one system. And it hangs together with Microsoft 365, Lexoffice and Outlook, so I no longer maintain anything twice.
That was my biggest worry, and it vanished into thin air. You open the platform once in the browser, add it to the home screen, done, and it feels like a perfectly normal app. On the office computer it works the same way, simply through the browser, with nothing to install. It is quick to use, works even with poor reception, and there is a light and a dark mode. After a few days nobody wanted to go back to paper.
My head is clear again for what matters. All the searching is gone. If I want to know how an assignment stands or how many hours someone has done, I look once and have the answer. When scheduling I even get a warning if someone is on too many hours, sick notes and leave sit directly in the system, and if I have nobody free, I simply put the assignment out for people to apply for. I barely have to keep track in my head any more, which is an enormous relief. The admin burden has shrunk considerably, and all those separate software costs have melted into one system. All in all I pay considerably less today than I did when I was covering a whole set of individual programs.
That digitalisation is nothing lofty, it simply means less paperwork and more time for the actual job. And you do not have to change everything at once. The most important step is to look honestly at your own daily routine and start exactly where most time is lost. And there is nothing to be afraid of: all of this exists already, it does not cost a fortune, and the business neither has to stop nor be turned upside down for it. I should have done it sooner.
We keep building it out. The good thing is that the platform grows with us. If we think of something new, say a marketing campaign for window cleaning in spring, we implement it. It is not a finished box, it is something that develops along with the business. I still have so many ideas. At the moment we are considering bringing stock keeping in and having the stocktake ready every month. ibx has become a real partner for me in that.
Very gladly. Anyone giving it serious thought is welcome to ring me at the office. I share my experience openly and honestly, whether it is about the changeover, the collaboration or daily life with the system. You can find my number with a quick search online, or simply ask ibx, they will be happy to put you in touch.
What was built for Wieland Gebäudereinigung, we build for any business exactly the way that business works. We look at your daily routine first and start where most time is lost.