"xRouten has integrated smoothly into our system landscape and complements it in exactly the right places."
About KANOLD
Since 1965 the name KANOLD has stood for expertise and quality in grounds maintenance and, of course, in winter services. What began as a small operation in Berlin Tiergarten has grown over the decades into not only a versatile company but a genuine brand. Companies such as BMW, BEHALA, Mercedes-Benz and the city-owned BSR are just some of the references KANOLD can point to. With more than 10,000 sites under winter service, the customer base includes not only the very large but medium and small ones too, and above all family households.
For all of them, more than 450 staff are deployed over the winter to keep roads, pavements and car parks safe to drive and walk on even in snow and ice. At peak season, around the clock.
The challenge
Before every winter season, René Rehag and his team face the task of planning more than 10,000 sites efficiently and distributing them across routes for their staff. Every site has its own particularities and work steps that absolutely have to be observed. Site sketches drawn up individually for each customer (several hundred gigabytes in total) are part of that, as are the tasks to be carried out in written form. Year after year and season after season, new customers are added. That is fantastic for the business, but it does not make the work any easier.
And because the routes do not stay the same from year to year, colleagues out on the road have to make sure every year that the new or altered routes fit perfectly, so that everything works when it counts and every customer is satisfied.
How KANOLD uses xRouten
KANOLD has been running its own in-house ERP, including a customer portal, since 2015. It is the software heart of the company, managing customer communication alongside every commercial process.
The system is even designed so that, depending on permission level, important information can be viewed, edited and fed back in from mobile devices. Staff in the office, staff out on site and all customers are connected to one another in this way. The transparency this creates is a further advantage for the company — one that does not yet exist in this form anywhere in the German winter service sector.
xRouten has integrated smoothly into our system landscape and complements it in exactly the right places.
says René Rehag, Managing Director at Eckard Kanold GmbH & Co. KG.
xRouten connects to the ERP through an interface and helps with visualising, planning and above all driving the routes.
Intuitive route planning on the map
Using the xRouten web app, the KANOLD team plans every route directly on an interactive map.
The stops we specify can be put into the desired order by the drivers very easily. During the practice runs in autumn, drivers can simply add extra notes about each site in xRouten, which makes the work considerably easier when it matters.
Thanks to the interface, tens of thousands of site sketches in PDF format also arrive in the system automatically.
A mobile app that is easy to operate
The drivers use the xRouten mobile app on their smartphones.
The app is self-explanatory. You see all the important information about the sites at a glance.
Navigation leads reliably from site to site and displays all the PDFs directly alongside the work description.
"New colleagues can get going straight away after a short briefing," says René Rehag. "That saves us a lot of onboarding time and helps with spontaneous changes or short-notice driver swaps."
Continuing with xRouten
KANOLD is planning to continue with xRouten in future too: "We are impressed by the constant development of the software and by the team's open ear for our needs," says Rehag. "We will be planning and navigating the coming winters with this partner as well."
