When Alfred Kärcher experimented with heat technology in the 1940s, he had no idea what a revolution it would revolutionise domestic cleaning. His invention - Europe's first heated high-pressure cleaner (today we call it the „vapka") - became the basis for the creation of a family-owned company that soon gained a worldwide reputation. Ingenuity and innovative thinking are still inherent in the company today. That's why the Czech branch thought how to organise their work in a more modern way than with pencil and paper. They tried Freelo and have been keeping their projects in order ever since.
"We want to make our customers' everyday lives as simple as possible. We help them achieve great results with powerful and efficient products."
The dirtiest place in the home is the dish sponge. You should put a new one by the sink at least once a week. Opportunity for a repeat assignment in Freelo? 😉
Before the introduction of Freelo, individual members of the department did projects on their own. Everyone had their own style, which didn't work well together. So every handover and every newbie training was a disproportionate burden.
Communication was more lengthy, the context was forgotten, sometimes it was only towards the end of the project that it was discovered that something had been left out. Problems that arose on the fly were solved. „It always worked out somehow, but we realised that we were spending a lot of time on 'rescuing' and that it would have been better to do it some other way," recalls Michal Štucaur.
The head office, which is based in Winnenden near Stuttgart, sets the tone for communication, but the implementation remains with the local branches. Kärcher in the Czech Republic thus had a free hand in choosing the project tool.
"We were looking for an intuitive tool that would suit everyone in the team and would be in Czech."
The main drivers for the introduction of Freelo were:
„With Freelo, work is more efficient. Communication is faster and the whole project is more flexible. All people involved in the project have the same information at the same time - available at any time. Both on a laptop and on a mobile phone," says Michal Štucaur, describing the change for the better: „In addition, we can see how well our collaboration works in the data, because we can evaluate the time spent on tasks. The communication is also much more responsive in terms of how we can see the results in the time we spend on the work."
"Freelo helps us to organize our ideas and processes of projects from the beginning to the end."
In 5 years of using Freelo at Kärcher, they have cleared
„We wanted an intuitive tool, and Freelo really is. We didn't have to implement it in any complicated way. Everyone figured out how to use it on their own in no time. If we needed a deeper insight into all the features, it would have taken some more study. Fortunately, Freelo has plenty of webinars, tutorials and demos, so we eventually know where to look," concludes Michal.