Now is the time to prepare

In five to ten years' time, anyonw that thinks they can compete on the market armed with just analog processes will find it tough going.

Andreas F.J. Obereder | CEO and Founder, ATOSS

What are the implications for top management?

Ten years ago, firms still had a manageable number of goals to focus on. Nowadays, top managers have to be stellar performers. Able to juggle a lot of topics and issues at the same time! You simply can’t do that any more without the full online transparency you get from digital processes.

One of these challenges is undoubtedly the “war for talent” – what’s your take on that?

The skills shortage has been a major challenge for companies for a long time now. But these days it’s being compounded by the phenomenon of the multi-optional society. It means employers have the tricky task of offering staff a stimulating working environment and securing their long-term loyalty with meaningful career prospects in a world of multifarious options and frequent fast-paced change. Today, recruitment and staff loyalty have become a top management priority.

How can ATOSS help companies?

In the “war for talent”, it helps if you stand out from the crowd by integrating your staff well in your workforce management processes. Being able to deploy them with great flexibility – managed via mobile apps – is also a bonus. In both respects, we offer solutions that can generate major strategic benefits. For instance, our solution enabled a major German hospital to cut its sickness rate by 2.5 percentage points and significantly reduce staff turnover, all thanks to greater employee 
satisfaction.

What has ATOSS learned in the “war for talent”?

For us too, recruiting the right people is a key growth driver and something our entire top management team is focusing on. We join forces in our search for the most talented individuals so we can build the best teams – the more varied and diverse, the better. Here are some examples of how we’ve actively lived diversity: 42 percent of our staff are female, which is above average for the IT industry, and we have a multigenerational workforce, with people hailing from 21 different countries, all of whom are working together to achieve our vision in a spirit of mutual trust and respect. As CEO, I’m particularly delighted that we were certified as a “Top Employer Germany” earlier this year.

You’re calling for more digitization – but aren’t issues like automation and robotics threatening your business model? After all, your software is used to plan and schedule people, not robots.

In Europe, the opposite is true. In Germany, for instance, there are now some three million fewer people working in the manufacturing industry than in the early ‘90s. This is all down to the automation that you mention and to production and logistics processes being controlled and connected up more smartly – Industry 4.0, in other words. In the same period, however, nearly ten million new jobs have been created in the service sector. What we’re actually seeing, in fact, is the transformation towards a service society. Some 75 percent of Germany’s entire working population is already employed in this sector, while in the USA it’s nearly 90 percent. That shows you how far things could still go.

Does that mean Europe won’t be manufacturing anything at all in the future?

No, I don’t think that will be the case. Rather, I believe that advancing automation will soon mean low-wage countries will lose their competitive edge for some goods as they’ll be competing with fully automated production lines. In the USA, for example, they’ve just unveiled the Sewbot – a sewing robot that can produce T-shirts faster and more cheaply than any worker in a low-wage country. If trends like these continue, production facilities could be brought back to where the end customers are. Back to Europe, for instance.

How can your workforce management suites contribute to the digitization that’s being called for?

Our solution used to be about supporting the admin side of managing and calculating working times. Today, that’s merely the platform on which we build high-performance algorithms with data on companies, employee requests and statutory frameworks. The result is an accurate forecast of personnel requirements and optimized planning aligned with that forecast. The quality of this planning allows companies to endow their workforce with greater flexibility. And this flexibility is urgently needed nowadays if staff are to be deployed with pinpoint accuracy to cope with all the fluctuating demands of business models.

What impact does that actually have in real life?

Making the best possible use of the available workforce is strategically important to any company these days. Personnel costs can be trimmed, while revenue and service levels go up. Our customer RITTER SPORT, for instance, has improved its processes, planning quality and transparency thanks to our solution. This has increased the productive working time of flexible staff by four percent. Companies can no longer afford to do without such benefits in this day and age. This value added – which can directly boost EBIT by tens of millions every year – means that our solutions deliver very rapid ROI. In our projects, this usually comes within nine to twelve months. We’ve proven this thousands of times in all industries.

In your experience, which sectors benefit particularly from digital workforce management?

Although the issue is relevant across the board, the effects can be especially positive in employment-intensive sectors that experience sharp demand fluctuations. In retail, for instance, where customers like EDEKA, ALDI SÜD, ROSSMANN and HORNBACH rely on our solution. But we've also been able to 
deliver significant benefits in logistics, manufacturing and the service sector, working with customers including Lufthansa, Deutsche Bahn, WISAG, thyssenkrupp Packaging Steel and HUK-COBURG. I’m particularly pleased that we also managed to win City of Munich – Germany’s largest municipal employer – as a customer this year. There’s tangible added value to be generated in the public sector too. 

That sounds like a lot of big players in the business arena. So what’s the situation with SMEs and smaller companies?

The issue is just as important for them. New laws and regulations such as the GDPR and the ruling by the European Court of  Justice mandating working time recording are increasing the need to invest in digital time and attendance management. So ATOSS offers solutions for companies with workforces of between two and 200,000. Our cloud-based solution Crewmeister is just perfect for micro-enterprises or individual departments of larger business units. Downloaded off the Internet in 60 seconds, set up in 15 minutes, and you’re up and running in a flash. Users can record times, manage holidays and plan their personnel deployment. We gained well over 1,000 new customers in this segment last year alone.

To what extent are compliance issues affecting your business?

No doubt about it, these are important issues – for companies as well as governance bodies. New laws and lists of potential punishments are making workforce management ever more complex. That’s the case both internationally, like with the ECJ ruling I’ve just mentioned, and at country level, such as with the WAB Act, which came into force in the Netherlands at the start of the year. Although the issue is an important hygiene factor, as it helps companies avoid legal action, it doesn’t generate any strategic benefits. For us, it lays the foundations required to answer the really exciting questions – for instance about demand-driven workforce management – together with our customers. 

Let’s take a look back, Mr. Obereder. Has ATOSS had the right answers for its customers over the past ten years?

Yes, I do think we brought the right solutions to market. Our share price is a good benchmark here. We’ve currently hit an all-time high of around EUR 150. That’s a rise of more than 1,100 percent in just ten years. I don’t really know of any other share that can boast that kind of performance. So we can look back with a great deal of satisfaction on the past decade, which was one of continuous success for us and all our stakeholders.