Skill BuilderS builds talent. For over 35 years, they have been discovering, developing and deploying talent. They assist and coach both companies and individuals. Their services include:
Job & career guidance
Talent & organization development
Coaching
Care for talent
Outplacement
Assessment
Talent development
In addition, they also contribute to a sustainable future.
Watch how Skill BuilderS tackles sustainable corporate mobility
Watch how Skill Builder Marieke experiences the Olympus app
How does Skill BuilderS approach sustainable corporate mobility?
Evita explains: “We are currently transitioning to a fully electric fleet. About half of our company cars are already electric.
Those who do not have company cars may use the Olympus app. We also try to promote the rental of bikes and scooters among our colleagues.”
What was your biggest obstacle in terms of mobility?
Evita: “Our colleagues work in different locations. Not everyone has a company car to move around. They have to use their own car or public transport.
The expenses they make then have to be paid in advance by themselves. The result? Tickets are submitted late, not at all or just get lost.”
What criteria did your solution have to meet?
Evita brings up two points: “On the one hand, we were looking for an automated process. We wanted to limit manual operations. No more tickets to enter, no more refunds to process.
On the other hand, we wanted a solution where our colleagues would not have to advance their tickets anymore. The Olympus app solves both issues.”
How did the implementation of the Olympus app go?
Evita: “Very smoothly. We started with a test phase where ten colleagues tested the app. We only got positive feedback, so we decided to partner up.
The implementation didn’t take much work. Olympus Mobility created the necessary accounts and our colleagues could start using the Olympus app.”
What is the biggest added value for Skill BuilderS?
Evita: “The amount of time saved. The many manual tasks are a thing of the past. Colleagues no longer have to advance the amount themselves either.”
She adds: “The benefit for the environment should not be underestimated either. We can better encourage our colleagues to take public transport.
For short trips, they take their bikes more often, as this avoids traffic jams and they get to their destination faster.”
How do colleagues experience the sustainable mobility policy?
We talked to Marieke Van Lysebetten, an avid cyclist and train traveler. She uses the Olympus app to easily order train tickets. When she still needs the car, she parks with 4411.
Marieke explains her experience: “The biggest change now that we use the Olympus app? The ease.
We no longer have to keep track of and enter tickets. It provides some extra headspace to think about other things.”
Marieke has always been an advocate for sustainable mobility. She uses her bike as much as possible when she can.
“I find it more enjoyable to move around by bike or train. You start your day fullyrelaxed. When I do have to take the car and get stuck in traffic, I miss my bike or the train.”
She continues: “I find it important to always consider my mode of transportation – is it really necessary for me to take the car? Can’t I just go by bike instead?
When, for example, we have a meeting in Brussels, I will be the one looking up the train times. Then I also encourage my colleagues to take the train together. Your day starts off much calmer. I can actually recommend it to everyone.”
What does the future hold?
Evita confidently responds: “More sustainable mobility! Encouraging colleagues even more to use public transport, cycling or scooters to get around.”
Sandra explains: “Your mobility policy should be set up for your employees first and foremost. Their input is therefore crucial. That’s why our approach began with an internal mobility survey with help of Traject.
Through this survey, we gained a better understanding of the specific mobility needs within our company. We got direct input about the travel behavior of our employees.”
That’s not the only advantage of a survey. Sandra continues: “This way, your employees get to think along with the sustainable path that your company wants to take.”
Step 2. Create a mobility team
The next step? A dedicated mobility team.
Sandra: “You want to encourage everyone in your company to use more sustainable mobility. We set up a mobility team with representatives from different departments.
Because of their exemplary role, you create a greater support base.
In addition to myself, our ‘Mobility Team’ consists of our Facility Manager, Communication Manager, HR Comp & Ben Manager, HR Director and CFO. Together we facilitate sustainable mobility at Mediahuis.”
Step 3. Determine your long-term goals
Sandra explains: “Next, our Mobility Team put its heads together to determine our vision, ambition and long-term goals.
Our current mobility plan consists of three parts:
Avoiding trips by teleworking
Sustainable travel
Greener driving.
Such a plan gives your mobility policy a clear direction. You work systematically towards your goals.
We also come together as a team on a regular basis. Then we look at the results and adjust when necessary.”
Step 4. Choose the right mobility partners
Sandra: “You can’t create a new mobility policy alone. You need the expertise of the right partners.
Mediahuis worked with three parties.
Stroohm assisted us in making our fleet more sustainable.
Traject supported us in sending out surveys, general communication and analysis of results.
Olympus Mobility provided a platform to simplify and encourage sustainable mobility for our employees.
These three parties transformed Mediahuis’ car policy into a full mobility policy without any extra work.
Furthermore, Olympus Mobility helps manage costs for companies with multiple locations – something that is very important for Mediahuis.”
Step 5. Communicate about your initiatives and results
Sandra: “Want your employees to be aware of your new mobility policy? Communicate about your initiatives.
We work with a specific newsletter about Mediahuis’ mobility. Here we discuss different themes, ranging from new features at Olympus Mobility or the Mobility Week to how you go on vacation with your car.
In addition, together with Traject, we also set up accessibility sheets for our locations. This way, our employees get a good idea of which mode of transport is the most efficient.”
Sandra adds: “What you must not forget is to communicate about the results of your actions. With attractive visuals, we involve our employees in our mobility story. We established a unique ‘Mediahuis Mobility’ logo to create recognition.
Continuing to communicate is key. You don’t want sustainable mobility to be a side issue, but something that your employees are actively involved in.”
Step 6. Keep adjusting
Sandra: “Mobility never stands still. Keeping track of your goals is crucial. You want to get a better view of how your employees experience the switch to sustainable alternatives.
We give each employee a budget to try out those alternatives and listen to their feedback. We also interview people who have exchanged their company car. This way, we can make timely adjustments when necessary.”
Their actions pay off. “We see that 86% of our employees know Olympus Mobility, and half of them already uses the Olympus app. Now that we’ve also introduced the legal mobility budget, that number will only increase.”
No wonder Mediahuis has been named a Pioneering Employer three times in a row. With their focus on sustainability and people-oriented approach, they are a true example.
Believe it or not, the legal mobility budget saves costs.
Think for example of parking costs, fuel or the repair of mirrors after an unfortunate accident.
These mobility costs decrease through the use of shared cars, bicycles, the train …
In the Olympus app, you also enjoy advantageous rates.
In addition, it also reduces the number of working hours lost to administration.
Thierry Devresse from My Mobility Budget Butler, expert and partner in the mobility budget, confirms: “A mobility budget requires less work than managing a company car.
The only thing you have to think about is the implementation. But that effort pays off. Afterwards, you will only gain time.”
When looking at corporate mobility evolutions, sustainable mobility policy is very present. Take a look at the advantageous legislation for electric company cars, for example.
That is precisely what the legal mobility budget is used for.
Not only with an environmentally friendly car, but also through alternative means of transport. You stimulate the use of public and shared transport or the purchase of an (electric) bicycle.
As a result, the legal mobility budget helps reduce CO2 emissions.
Thierry adds: “The mobility budget gives your company a modern and responsible image.”
B-architecten is a platform of talented designers who want to weigh in on policy and have an impact on the quality of living and life.
Designing is their core task – from door handle to city district – but they also invest in innovative research. They publish and discuss, initiate their own initiatives, and seize opportunities to push the boundaries of their profession.
They are part of the ‘B’ group, together with:
B-bis: specialists in private projects and interior assignments
Klaas: “At B-architecten, we are working towards a sustainable society. That starts with our architecture. Logically, we extend that mentality to the way we travel.”
He explains: “Architects often need to go to projects and appointments.
We looked for a general solution to get our people from point A to point B as quickly and sustainably as possible.”
Did planning your business trips always go smoothly?
Klaas: “We used to have a series of tickets here, for example for the train. There was also a car that was away whenever someone needed it, along with some bicycles.”
The mobility management was an administrative mess.
“Before B-architecten was also present in Brussels and Ghent, everyone came to Antwerp for the right bike keys, car keys, tickets … We then booked these in our Outlook calendars.”
How did you solve the administrative nightmare?
Klaas: “We switched to the Olympus app. That way, our architects can easily move around to their projects all over Belgium.
We no longer have to look for car keys, Cambio cards or train passes.
The Olympus app combines all mobility services and replaces our current administration.”
How was the transition to the Olympus app?
Klaas: “Very simple. We first let a group of five employees who often had to go out on the job test out the app. They only gave positive feedback.
We quickly decided to roll out the app for the whole group.
By lowering the subscription rate for employees who barely use the app, we keep costs under control.”
How do you experience the use of Olympus Mobility for your business trips?
Klaas: “Wonderful! There are always cars and train tickets available.
It is also much simpler administratively for our architects. They have the Olympus app at hand and can buy their tickets without any problems.”
Time to talk to an app user
We talked to architect Stéphanie Collier. She and her colleagues use the Olympus app to travel sustainably to projects.
Even in Stéphanie’s private life, she puts the car aside. She and her family prefer to hop on a bicycle or use public transport.
Her favorite mode of transport? “That’s got to be the train.”
Has the Olympus app changed sustainable mobility for you?
Stephanie: “With the Olympus app, I keep discovering new mobility services. Because they’re all bundled into one app, I try actually them out as well.”
She adds: “Because of the Olympus app, I take public transport more often than before.”
Klaas picks up on this and says: “The fewer steps you have to take to book your transport, the more you will make use of different forms of transport.”
He continues: “We are a relatively young team. We do not have the mindset to cross the whole country by car. With the Olympus app, we can still go anywhere without using a car.”
And that is clear in their commuting as well.
Klaas states: “At this moment there are hardly any employees who come to work by car.”
What are the plans for the future in terms of mobility?
Klaas: “Let’s keep going down our current path!”
We certainly agree with that. Great work!
Thanks for the nice conversation, Klaas & Stéphanie. We’re glad that you don’t have to look for car keys anymore. 😉
Thierry: “Implementing the legal mobility budget starts with an up-to-date mobility policy. In other words, a mobility policy focused on flexibility and reducing CO2 emissions.
Companies should look at the latest developments in mobility: electric vehicles, charging stations, charging cards… and alternative forms of transportation.
Electric cars fit nicely into Pillar 1 of the legal mobility budget: an environmentally friendly car.
The remaining budget can be spent by employees on alternative forms of transportation under Pillar 2.”
Tip 2. Think of teleworking
Thierry: “While you update your mobility policy, don’t forget teleworking either. We don’t call it ‘the new normal’ for nothing.
This extra degree of flexibility increases the success of the legal mobility budget.
By having more people work from home, employees feel less need for a big company car. Instead, they look for alternative solutions such as the mobility budget.”
He goes on: “Employees who work from home 50% of the time can even use their budget to cover housing costs. A very big advantage and one which is being taken advantage of eagerly.”
“The implementation of teleworking in your mobility policy increases the success of the legal mobility budget.”
Thierry Devresse, My Mobility Budget Butler
Tip 3. Get guided through the implementation.
“The setup and implementation of the legal mobility budget take a lot of time. Especially when you try to figure it all out yourself.
With a consultant, you can save yourself tons of work.
He or she has the right expertise and immediately ensures that you are legally in order. With one to three days of consulting from an expert, you can get started.”
Tip 4. Manage administration with the right partner
“The right guidance not only makes the implementation of the legal mobility budget easier. An external partner also saves you a lot of time for managing it.”
Thierry explains: “Keeping track of reimbursements, subscriptions, commuting… it’s a lot of work. Not to mention how to keep track of the different budgets of your employees.
With the right partner, you keep control and stay afloat.
For a completely carefree experience, My Mobility Budget Butler works with Olympus Mobility. This way companies get optimal guidance for both implementation and mobility management.”
Tip 5. Communicate
Thierry: “The legal mobility budget is not immediately clear to everyone. Good communication is therefore essential.
I recommend providing thorough presentations. Tell your employees how it works, what they can use their budget for and how they can easily keep track of it.
You could even make videos.”
Thierry adds with a laugh: “Remember that you will always get questions afterwards. You may have already familiarized yourself with the matter, but for some, it’s completely new.
Still, all your work will pay off. Smooth communication results in greater satisfaction from your employees and greater interest in the legal mobility budget.”
The legal mobility budget is a sustainable and tax-advantageous alternative to the company car. With that budget, employees exchange their company cars for an environmentally friendly car and other alternative forms of transport.
Specifically, the legal mobility budget consists of three pillars:
Environmentally friendly company cars: cars with a maximum CO2 emission of 95 g/km (this regulation will change in 2026 to cars without CO2 emissions).
Sustainable mobility and housing costs: public or shared transport, purchase or maintenance of a bicycle or scooter, rental or loan …
Cash: at the end of the year, your employee will be paid out the remaining budget, after a reduction of 38.07% special employee contribution.
Who is entitled to the legal mobility budget?
The answer is twofold:
Employees who are already driving a company car today.
Employees with a position that entitles them to a company car, but don’t (yet) use it.
We also make two remarks here:
The legal mobility budget can only be implemented when you have had a mobility policy for three years and when at least one employee has a company car on which he or she pays VAA.
When you currently offer salary benefits in exchange for the company car, your employee cannot exchange these benefits for the mobility budget.
How do I calculate the legal mobility budget?
In short? Based on the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). In other words: the total annual gross cost of the company car.
It includes costs related to the car, such as:
The lease or rental price of the car
Fuel Insurance
CO2 solidarity contribution
Non-deductible VAT
…
For employees who are eligible for the mobility budget, but do not have a company car, it is different. They first choose a fictitious company car. Based on that you determine their TCO.
Currently there is no official calculator to calculate the mobility budget, but it is likely that this year the federal government will release a TCO Mobility Budget Calculator.
While we wait, we appeal to some concrete guidelines. The budget amounts to …
Minimum €3,000
Maximum one-fifth of the gross annual salary of the employee or €16,000 per calendar year
The Olympus Mobility product development team is a multi-disciplinary team with backend developers, a web developer, mobile app developer, product designer and with the CTO and CEO sharing the product management role.
At the beginning of 2022 the product development team decided that it wanted to deliver faster because it had become harder to meet release dates. We wanted to take a step back to find out what was going on and find ways to improve.
1. Visualise work
Work Item Level
First, we figured out how to get useful data about the work done and found ways to visualise the last month’s work with the hope that it could lead us to insights.
We started looking at work item level and exported data from JIRA. A work item can be a story or a bug.
We exported the cycle time for work items for our delivery process for the period between the 1st of October 2021 and 15th of April 2022. Cycle time is the time that a work item spends as work in progress within a predefined set of process boundaries. As process boundaries we took the moment a developer picks up a work item for implementation until it is finished and ready to deploy to production. This includes time to implement the work item, have a peer review and a QA stage. We focussed on this part of the process because the people in the team felt stressed out because of the workload, context switching and lack of focus and we had reliable data.
The cycle time we calculated didn’t include the deployment to production itself because that happened every two weeks and it wasn’t tracked in JIRA with a separate workflow state.
The cycle time for all our feature work is visualised here in a cycle time scatter plot [1]:
In a cycle time scatter plot every dot represents a work item. The horizontal axis on the chart indicates when the work item was completed. The vertical axis indicates how long the work item spent in progress within the process boundaries we’ve chosen. In this plot we chose days as the unit of time.
What this chart shows us is that 50% of the work items that were completed between the 1st of October 2021 and 15th of April 2022 were completed within 3 days. 85% of all work items were completed within 11 days and 95% of the items were completed within 32 days.
The less variability there is in cycle time the more predictable you are as a team and in our case we think that 85% of work items completed in 11 days doesn’t look bad at all.
The learnings we took from this exercise:
We should pay attention when ‘in progress’ work items cross the 8 – 10 days of age because it looks like once they cross this threshold they often stay in progress for a long time. We need to pay more attention to work item age and act to prevent long cycle times.
We can also look into the outliers to find out why they took so long and find out if they have something in common that we need to pay attention to.
In general we are very pleased with the cycle time of individual work items for this part of our product development process and we don’t think we need to dig any deeper right now.
Feature level
Next we looked one level up to the feature level. With a feature we mean a larger deliverable that needs many work items to be completed before delivering value. Some examples of features are: extend our mobile app to let users use a car sharing service or order a train ticket.
The team felt that they were working on many things at the same time and when we looked at the data this is what we found:
In October 2021 we worked on 5 features in parallel
In November 2021 we worked on 4 features in parallel but 2 of the features were new ones. For 3 of the features that we worked on in October we paused the work.
In December 2021 we worked on 6 features in parallel, luckily none of them were newly started.
In January 2022 we also worked on 5 features, none of them new.
In February 2022 we worked on 8 features in parallel of which 3 were new.
In March 2022 we worked on 8 features in parallel.
In April 2022 we also worked on 8 features in parallel.
We were working on more features in parallel than we had people in the team during this timeframe (7 people were part of the product development team).
So although the team did a great job at finishing individual work items we worked on many features in parallel which resulted in a long cycle time for each of the individual features.
My expectation was that we would have a low flow efficiency for the individual features due to lots of context switching. Flow efficiency for a feature is the ratio of the total active time a feature was worked on to the cycle time it took to complete the feature.
For example, if a feature took 10 days to complete but it only required 2 days of active work the flow efficiency is 20%. It means that the work spent 8 days in some inactive state.
Flow efficiency is often difficult to measure because it means we need to be able to distinguish active from inactive time. If your workflow has wait states in between every state, for example ‘development in progress’ → ‘waiting for review’ → ‘review’, and the state changes are kept up-to-date reasonably well you can calculate flow efficiency. Our workflow doesn’t have wait states but we are required to do time tracking for accounting purposes. This means we track daily how much time we spent per feature and this allows us to measure flow efficiency quite accurately.
So based on these worklogs / timesheets we were able to both calculate flow efficiency for every feature and visualise how we spent our time as a team [2]:
The image above shows a Gantt chart which is often misused to represent a project plan. Misused, because Gantt charts are typically created before the work starts. However during the product development process we still learn new things that affect the work that needs to be done and so laying out a detailed plan and estimating how long it will take beforehand is hardly ever accurate. The project plan also typically assumes 100% flow efficiency which is almost never the case.
The Gantt chart that I show here represents how we actually spent our time as a team based on the work logs. It is not at all how a predefined project plan typically looks like.
Each line in the chart represents a different feature we worked on. For the purpose of this blog post the actual feature descriptions have been renamed to generic values ‘Feature 1’, ‘Feature 2’,… If a day is coloured for a feature it means at least someone in the team logged time on the feature. It shows really well how scattered our time was spent and how it increases the cycle time for each of the features. You can see this by the many gaps and a lot of context switching.
The flow efficiency for these features for this time frame is, sorted ascending: 7%, 9%, 12%, 14%, 16%, 22%, 36%, 53%. This is because on average, things are waiting somewhere 4 times more than they’re being actively worked on!
On top of this, one stream of work that isn’t visible in the drawing is operational support. The team spent 25% of its time on unplanned work to support the operations team or help answering questions from customers or fix bugs.
As you can imagine, the team was very busy and we had a very high resource utilisation but a low flow efficiency. As a result, delivering value to our customers took longer than it should and the feeling of being overwhelmed was high due to constant context switching and feeling busy all the time without time to recover.
Some reasons why we worked on so many features at the same time:
Features got pushed to the team instead of pulled by the team when they were ready for new work. The reason features got pushed to the team was because release dates were agreed with partners when the work wasn’t clear yet and without leaving enough slack time for unplanned work. When a feature was agreed to be delivered 6 months from now and after 3 months a new customer wanted to sign a contract but really needed an extension to our platform it became the same priority as the planned feature and it was pushed to the team. This is totally understandable (we like new customers!) but to make it less stressful for our small team we should have left some slack in the schedule to be able to cope with unplanned requests in a sustainable way and not fill the schedule for months upfront.
Features got paused because some partners have release cycles with predefined dates. If a feature was almost but not completely ready for release on the predefined date it was only up for the next release in 3 months time. This meant that even when only one more week was needed to complete the feature it went dormant for almost 3 months until the partner’s release schedule allowed it to pick it up again to do final integration tests and release it. These fixed release schedules mean we unnecessarily delay bringing value to our users and also results in more work in progress and secondary needs (context switching, new people are put on the product after 3 months which lack context and need more guidance,…).
Gathering metrics and visualising the work helped us to realise something needed to change. It was clear that there was a big opportunity to deliver value sooner and with lower stress for the team.
2. Stabilise
The first thing we decided as a team was that we should first finish what we were working on and not start anything new unless we needed to meet an earlier agreed release date.
In the following weeks and months we were actually able to finalise most of the ‘work in progress’ features and make them available to our users which was very welcome.
In an ideal world we would work with the team on as few features or topics as feasible and focus on releasing the value to our users as soon as possible with good quality and learn from feedback. Once the team is ready for new work we decide what’s the next most important or impactful topic and we repeat. Deciding as late as possible about the next priority means we have the most context to decide what’s the most important at the moment we are ready to pick up new work.
Unfortunately we can’t always stick to this ideal way of working because we work with partners who want to commit to release dates and intermediate milestones (e.g. integration testing phase) long beforehand so we don’t always have the freedom to decide as late as possible what’s the next most important thing to work on. We need to live with these constraints and what we’ll try in this case is:
take past cycle times for features into account to try to get to a realistic release date
prioritise the work with predefined release dates first so we’ll have a high change of meeting the external constraints without too much stress
be cautious of new work getting pushed to the team. Switch to pulling of work when something finishes as the default mode of operation
This should result in positive outcomes for both our team (deliver with quality and without much stress) and our partners (Olympus Mobility is reliable and is meeting release dates).
3. Test case: VAB one-off breakdown assistance
Soon after we came up with our findings and actions described in the previous two sections at the end of April 2022 a new release date came in sight which was already agreed upon at the end of 2021. We committed to bring the one-off breakdown assistance (OOBA) product by VAB to the KBC Mobile Banking app.
OOBA is a product that allows car drivers to get help when their car breaks down.
By the end of April 2022 the discovery phase (or Fuzzy front end phase) for OOBA was finished and we were expected to be ready with the development by the 16th of July 2022. This marked the start of the end-to-end integration test phase. The integration test phase was followed by pen tests on the 15th of August, a pilot release on the 31th of August and finally a public release on the 12th of September 2022.
We decided to let a small multi-disciplinary team focus on building the product. We thought this was the option with the best chance of getting the delivery of OOBA ready by the 16th of July.
The team started its first work item on the 12th of May and also introduced some practices which helped us meet the release dates and which I’ll describe in the next paragraphs.
We made sure we got faster feedback by introducing concurrent development. Backend and frontend developers started and worked together to get a functioning end-to-end slice ready as soon as feasible. This involved starting with API’s which returned mock content which got replaced by the real implementation as backend development progressed.
Implementing the end-to-end functionality also included integration with external parties (VAB and KBC) as soon as we could. We didn’t wait until the planned integration test phase that was scheduled months later. This all with the purpose of spotting possible integration issues sooner and to be able to finish work items and not postpone feedback.
Once some work was ready to demo we showed it at our weekly status meeting with all stakeholders. This was much appreciated and gave us valuable feedback which we often could incorporate by the next meeting.
During our daily status meeting with the Olympus Mobility team we focussed on removing blockers to prevent work from aging. We focussed on finishing what already started before starting anything new.
The ability to focus and the introduction of the practices described earlier resulted in a cycle time of 7 days for 85% of the work items and 10 days for 95% of the work items. Compared to what we showed for the period 1st of October 2021 – 15th of April 2022 the cycle time improved and we have less variation which means we are more predictable. The flow efficiency for the OOBA work ended up being 60%.
Mid may 2022 we also switched from our biweekly releases to Continuous Delivery (CD) for our backend and web developments. Each developer became responsible to deploy their changes to production. The cycle time for OOBA above includes deploying the changes for work items to production. Switching to CD saves us about a half a day every two weeks that we needed to deploy all changes to production in bulk. By introducing CD, we deliver value to users sooner and it has no negative impact on our availability.
We did organise our team for fast flow but we were also hugely dependent on the support of the partners we integrated with, VAB and KBC. It’s only thanks to their fast response time and feedback when debugging integration issues that we could meet these challenging release dates.
We met the release dates and the OOBA product is available from the 12th of September 2022 in the KBC Mobile Banking app. Delivering OOBA was definitely considered a success both for the product development team and the stakeholders. We are taking the learnings from the JIRA data and the process changes with us when planning and delivering future product initiatives and we’ll continue to inspect and adapt to keep improving the speed and quality of the mobility services we deliver to our users.
Copying these practices might not give the same results in your product development context but it might give you some inspiration on how to evaluate and if needed improve flow. Thanks for reading.
[1] : The cycle time scatter plot was created using the jira-agile-metrics github project. It provides data that gives more insight compared to what you get out of JIRA without additional extensions or apps. You get for example percentile data about cycle times which is important as cycle time data doesn’t have a normal distribution and so the averages Jira provides aren’t helpful. Generating the data is easy but cleaning the data took quite a bit of time. We for example had work items that were used for time tracking outside of the software delivery process and which went from Todo → Done without going through the actual workflow. These and other tickets needed to get filtered to get more accurate results. Take this in mind when trying to come up with useful metrics.
[2] : The flow efficiency calculations and the Gantt chart are generated using the work-exposure github project.
your administration is limited to one monthly invoice,
and your employees are happy because they can freely choose how to reach their destination at any time of the day.
Why are the waiting times for company cars so long?
It is not difficult to pinpoint the reason behind the long delivery times of cars: it has everything to do with the Coronavirus crisis.
As car dealers were forced to close their shops in 2020, sales reached a low point. This led to a fall in demand from car manufacturers, who in turn reduced their production.
The producers of chips and semiconductors that run our car computers also encountered the same problems. However, they quickly found an equivalent alternative in the market for electronics such as smartphones and game consoles. During the lockdown, demand in this niche market actually rose, and quite significantly.
The car market therefore fell behind in terms of priority.
The shortage of chips and semiconductors disrupted the logistics flow.
Deliveries to car manufacturers were delayed.
Several factories closed their doors.
The logical consequence thereof? Increasing delivery times and long waiting times for company cars and private cars. The Coronavirus crisis turned out to be, as it were, a semiconductor crisis.
Delivery periods are sometimes as long as two years
To this day, we still feel the effects of the Coronavirus years.
Waiting times for company cars vary from six months to two years, depending on the selected make and model.
The war in Ukraine is also having an impact.
Currently, we are facing interrupted transport routes and a shortage of wiring harnesses, important electrical components in vehicles.
Is there any prospect of improvement? Not really.
This makes matters very complicated for fleet managers in particular: electric and other company cars are not given priority. Waiting times are getting longer and the mobility of your employees is seriously affected by the delays.
Is there a solution?
Of course, there is a solution. Ensuring smooth transport starts with reviewing your current fleet. Working from home has become an integral part of the business world. Many employees are not required to travel to and from work as often anymore. Their company cars are more stationary than moving these days.
Are the leasing contracts at your company about to mature? Then this could be the perfect time to ask yourself, are all those company cars really still necessary? Is there a cheaper alternative?
Sustainable mobility soon emerges as a viable alternative when searching for an equivalent option. This is not surprising, as public and shared transport perfectly meet the mobility needs of your employees.
But in all honesty, the additional administrative burden that comes with that is considerable. One expense report can easily take up several hours to process. We can help with our Olympus App.
When your employees pay a benefit in kind (BIK), it is difficult as an organisation to reduce the costs of private travel. To save on petrol costs, you can of course tell your employees to change their driving style and remove unnecessary items from their cars, but old habits die hard. With a company car, you keep losing a lot of money.
So how do you cut back? Reduce the costs linked to commuting and business travel. This is easy to do with alternative mobility.
Example in figures
Let’s look at the numbers. In this fictional example, we are travelling from Ghent to Antwerp. We depart from Bevrijdingslaan 288 and arrive at Uitbreidingstraat 2 for a meeting around 9 am.
By car
First of all, we travel this route by petrol car. We drive 62.2 km, with the petrol price at € 2.025 per litre. With a consumption of 6.8 per 100 km, the fuel cost comes to € 17.13. However, that is only one aspect of the total cost. Added to this is the consumption cost (cost of kilometres driven with the leased car, € 24.88) and the parking cost (€ 5).
The result? 1 outbound trip costs € 27.27.
By car
By public transport
That same route can easily be done by public transport. A train ticket from Ghent to Antwerp costs (round trip) €16.60 with a Standard Multi. We also take the bus twice, which costs € 3.40 with a ten-ride card. We covered the last kilometres with a Blue-bike (€ 3.75).
The result? 1 outward trip costs € 14.45.
By public transport
What about loss in time?
A car trip between Ghent and Antwerp takes about 45 minutes, but that is without any traffic jams. Realistically, such a trip takes (at least) 90 minutes.
That is the same as the time required using public transportation. But unlike a car trip, you can actually spend this time usefully, because your hands are free to answer e-mails or prepare for meetings. On top of that, you arrive without having had to deal with the stress of traffic jams.
Time and cost savings
When using public transport you can make optimal use of your time and you save € 12.82 per journey. If you take this route four times a month, you will save € 51.28. This amounts to € 615.36 on an annual basis. For a company with 20 company cars, this comes down to annual savings of € 12,307.20! Your organisation can therefore save a lot of money by implementing alternative means of transport.
Employees can also enjoy discounted rates and take advantage of a smart NMBS algorithm in the Olympus app. Besides saving on petrol costs, you will also significantly reduce your administrative expenses. KPMG and Sweco are already doing it.
Want to learn more about sustainable business mobility? Contact us.
The legal mobility budget 2.0 is easier and offers more options
De Croo’s government has announced that all new company cars must be CO2 neutral by 2026 and that the statutory mobility budget will be improved.
What does this mean for companies?
Olympus Mobility explains briefly:
First of all, the standard for CO2 emissions will be based on the WLTP standard as of September 2021. This means that there will be an increase in the permissible CO2 emissions from company cars under pillar 1 up to 120g/km.
This is good news for employees! They would now have more opportunities to buy a smaller and environmentally friendly car under pillar 1 of the statutory mobility budget.
Then there is the abolition of waiting periods for both employers (36 months) and employees (12 months) for the mass introduction of the statutory mobility budget.
There would also be changes in the reimbursement of housing costs. The geographical criterion that the employee must live within a 5 km radius of the workplace would be widened, and the conditions for financing a mortgage would be eased.
Finally, there are also various tax incentives for the electrification of company cars.
E.g., investments in charging stations will benefit from a tax reduction of 45%. This should encourage the electrification of company cars.
With this proposal, the first concrete steps have been taken towards the government’s ambition of making corporate mobility greener!
Please note that this is still a legislative proposal. It still has to be approved by the government and by parliament before it can be implemented. We are confident that this will happen soon!
Staying on the road with Olympus Mobility is easy!
