At Loetje (Restaurant Company Europe), facility management software and vision come together – that makes for a winning combination!

About Loetje

When you say Loetje, you speak of the most delicious steak. Served in real Loetje gravy, with fries and white bread. In a no-nonsense way, with passion and quality. What began in 1977 as a local pub and billiards bar has now become a chain of restaurants spread across the Netherlands. This summer Loetje opened its 26th location in Arnhem and several new openings are planned for the coming year.

Since July 2020, Loetje formed along with Debuut Horeca BV the prominent Restaurant Company Europe (RCE). With more than 75 restaurant and pub locations, RCE is the largest hospitality group in the Netherlands with a total of almost 3000 employees. All these locations are centrally managed from the headquarters in Amstelveen. In addition to Loetje, the portfolio of RCE consists of several other strong hospitality concepts with multiple locations such as Happy Italy, Beers & Barrels, Popo the Mexican and Stan, also with unique sites such as Waag in Leiden and De Vooruitgang in Eindhoven.

At the beautiful location of Loetje on the river Amstel we talked to Sander Vos (left on the picture), Facility Coordinator at Restaurant Company Europe (right: Jan Van Rabenswaaij, Senior Account Manager Spacewell)

Facilities Management Software: How it Started at Restaurant Company Loetje

In February 2017, restaurant company Loetje adopted Axxerion as its facilities management software. Sander, at the start of his career at Loetje 5.5 years ago, was entrusted with the task of purchasing and implementing an IWMS system for facilities management. In his previous role at D&B Facilities, he had positive experiences with Axxerion, so he decided to investigate the solution further. ICT also expressed its wish to work with tickets and the marketing department was willing to implement the software for operational purposes. After investigating the solutions of four vendors, Axxerion was selected. Sander points out that it is important that you carefully consider and define the requirements and expectations for the system so that a consultant can work on them in a targeted way.

“We started with the ticketing module, followed by the contract module and the project module. The latter was particularly useful because many new locations were opened. It allowed us to have a central place per department where all actions and tasks were listed, and everyone could get a view of which tasks needed to be handled and which department they were assigned to.”

“This provides structure, that is, an overview”

The recruitment department has also been working with Axxerion for a year now. First, we looked at the systems they already had in place before starting to deploy a whole new one. Sander demonstrated to his colleagues how Axxerion works, and since Axxerion has been already in use at the locations, it proved to be a very convenient tool to create tickets for recruitment requests, such as for hiring new staff members like dishwashers or waiters. A request is first submitted to a regional manager for approval, upon which the request is forwarded to the recruitment department in Axxerion. Recruitment then links candidates to a recruitment request, just like work orders to a facility request. The contact details and CV can also be linked to that, and the status can be added, for example, “new candidate” or “invited for an interview”. Currently, around 500 employees work with Axxerion, from supervisors to site managers. They all are using the system to create requests.

Positive user experience

Most of the knowledge transfer about Axxerion was done by Sander Vos himself. In 3 months, he visited 26 Debuut sites to teach his restaurant colleagues how to use the facilities management software. That went very smoothly, and everyone quickly learned to work with Axxerion. The users agree that the system allows them to look things up easily and it is convenient to work with. We have kept working with Axxerion on a basic level, as much as possible, to ensure that things are managed easily. This also makes it more flexible to expand.