About Protection One GmbH
As a pioneer and market leader in 24h remote monitoring with real-time intervention, Protection One GmbH, a Securitas Company, has developed various options for the permanent monitoring and protection of properties. With a 24/7 staffed in-house emergency call and service control center, Protection One offers all services from a single source. Our nationwide sales and technical network also ensure competent and prompt service at the customer's site. Currently, around 260 employees at ten locations provide holistic advice and customer orientation about security on a daily basis.
Whether burglary, theft, vandalism, fire or robbery - our security service is an effective alternative to classic alarm systems and relies on a fast response time: If an alarm is triggered in an area remotely monitored by Protection One, it is immediately forwarded to the emergency call and service control center. In order for the company to guarantee its customers a fast response time, internal communication must also be fast paced. For this, smooth processes within the company are essential - and these in turn require an error-free and up-to-date process description. For example, the guards in the Protection One emergency call centers can respond in a matter of seconds: They address the intruder loudly and ask him to name the password individually agreed upon with the client. This unexpected, personal confrontation usually unsettles the intruder to such an extent that he immediately takes flight - without stolen goods. If this is not the case and the perpetrator cannot authenticate himself by means of the password even after repeated requests, the intervention chain defined in advance with the client is activated in parallel - such as alerting the police. This extremely successful concept is based on an efficient management system and it works: The 24-hour remote monitoring with real-time intervention has an independently audited loss prevention rate of 97.3 percent. This means that in more than 97 out of 100 cases, the perpetrator abandons his plan without causing any significant damage.
The challenge before Q.wiki
Protection One GmbH is a growing company. With around 50 new employees every year, the time needed for onboarding is enormous. Therefore, an important point for Thorsten Schmidt and the Quality Management (QM) department was to simplify and shorten the onboarding process for new employees. In addition, consultation times in day-to-day work were to be reduced by documentation that was created "by the employees for the employees" and was highly up to date. Multiple documentations of the same content, as in the old folder structure, should be avoided in the future. The local editing of our documents, which was restricted by access rights, was always accompanied by the fact that only a few managers - primarily Thorsten Schmidt - had to deal with changes. As a result, our documents were often not up to date - so we wanted to give all our employees the opportunity to change processes and work instructions directly and distribute the responsibility for the content among several shoulders. Finally, we wanted to reduce the effort required for our certifications and simplify audits - here, too, our managers had to spend a considerable amount of time preparing and following up.
The decision for Q.wiki
The concept of a wiki-based management software convinced us: The idea of collecting all our company knowledge, best practices, i.e. everyday relevant knowledge from and for our employees in one place was the cornerstone for solving our problems. The decentralized nature of the system allows us to distribute tasks and responsibilities for documentation, thus relieving managers. The team from Modell Aachen showed the QM team around Thorsten Schmidt what an interactive and "living" management system can look like and supported us in implementing it in our company.
Success with Q.wiki
We have been using Q.wiki for 6 years now and the success continues: We have an average of over 4,000 read accesses per month - and the trend is rising.
The widespread acceptance and use of Q.wiki means an estimated total net saving of more than €1.04 million per year for us. This success can be broken down as follows:
In the first year, we invested approximately €190,000 in Q.wiki. This includes internal and external as well as initial and running costs. On the other hand, however, initial benefits from the Q.wiki implementation were already visible. From the second year on, this initial investment has paid for itself many times over: For Thorsten Schmidt, ongoing costs of around €240,000 are offset by ongoing savings of €1.28 million - resulting in an expenditure saving of around €1.04 million. The biggest areas of savings in our company include:
1. Reduction of consultation times
We assume that the good documentation in our management system leads to our employees finding a suitable answer in Q.wiki for every 5th question with little effort. Our "cheat sheet" therefore helps to reduce the query time per employee by 20%. This results in a savings potential of more than 500,000 € per year for our company.
2. Reduced training time
Thanks to Q.wiki, we expect a reduction in training time of 20 days per new employee - 15 days less for our new colleagues and 5 days less for their contacts. With around 50 new employees per year, the savings through Q.wiki at this point are also enormous: over 500,000 € per year!
The last two years were particularly challenging due to Corona, as we also had to switch to remote work for the most part. This has shown us once again how important Q.wiki has become for us as a central source of information. On the one hand, the changeover was simplified enormously, and on the other hand, many new work instructions were created that we didn't need before and are now very helpful due to the changed situation. For example, instructions on how to set up VPN access are very valuable, especially for new employees, and company-wide access to fundamental information can significantly relieve the burden on all departments. In addition, existing descriptions have been put to the test, elaborated in more detail, and improved.
In general, our documentation has become much more detailed through the use of Q.wiki. For example, we now have work instructions for vacation requests or travel expense reports. This is not necessary for ISO 9001 certification - nevertheless, we know how valuable this documentation is in various areas in everyday life, completely independent of certifications.
3. Single Point of Truth & avoidance of redundant effort
The central and easily accessible documentation in Q.wiki has produced a jointly created single point of truth for us: Previously, much was not documented or information was outdated. With Q.wiki, we have been able to gather all our knowledge in one place. This leads to fewer errors due to "not knowing" and saves an estimated 65,000 € per year. We save another €90,000 by maintaining a decentralized, central system because all employees always work on and with the same information. Thanks to the clarity and easy accessibility for every employee, we were able to eliminate duplicate documentation right from the start. This means that the documentation effort for each employee has been reduced by a good half.
4. Relief for managers
In Q.wiki, we have clearly defined the responsibilities from the very beginning, so that every employee involved knows his or her tasks. This made it possible to hand over responsibility from Thorsten Schmidt and his colleagues in the management circle to knowledge carriers, some of whom now act as responsible persons. We estimate the savings from reducing the workload of our managers at a further €60,000 per calendar year. Another advantage of this approach: Today, for example, technicians are also responsible for processes, because they have the knowledge relevant to everyday life that really helps their colleagues. This results in many useful tips, tricks and best-practice instructions.
5. Reduced certification effort
Certifications are necessary for us - but thanks to Q.wiki, they are no longer a tiresome and, above all, stressful task. Q.wiki has become our central corporate platform and source of information for all employees. Thanks to consistently high read and write accesses, we have clean and up-to-date documentation - the discrepancy between documentation and reality that existed in the past is no longer something we know today. We therefore pass audits almost "on the side".
We have 25 site managers responsible for the four external audits per year. We estimate that we have been able to reduce this time expenditure by 70% or a good €23,000 per year. Thanks to the decentralized structure of the system, Thorsten Schmidt and his QM staff are greatly relieved of the burden of documentation. As a result, each QM employee saves an additional 30 days of documentation per year. In addition, thanks to the good structure, the up-to-datedness of all required processes, and the simple assignment of standards, we were able to reduce the time required to conduct audits from 2 to 1.5 days. Overall, we pass all audits effortlessly and there is a total saving of over €60,000 per year.
Future plans with Q.wiki
The safety of our customers is our greatest concern. That is why Thorsten Schmidt and his QM colleagues place a high value on the quality of the service and thus also of the processes - and do so transparently to customers and other stakeholders. For this reason, we have been working with the certification body "Vertrauen durch Sicherheit" (VdS) for many years and regularly have ourselves certified. These independent certificates generate trust and set us apart from the competition. In particular, the VdS seal of approval enjoys an excellent reputation among customers and interested parties. A major project that we recently completed is certification to VdS 10000, which is based on ISO 27001 information security. That's great, because a demonstrably high level of information security is a very important issue for us, especially with the increasing remote activity of many employees. And especially in times of increased cyberattacks, we can thus present an independent certification that confirms that we guarantee the security of data against unauthorized access. Since data protection and information security are inextricably linked, Thorsten Schmidt has herewith added a further building block to the already existing High Level Structure (HLS). For our customers this means: High confidence in the performance of our company through the fact of knowing that their own company data is protected and that the risks to possible restrictions of the ability to deliver are minimized. In a two-day, corona-compliant audit, the existing information security documents in Q.wiki were analyzed and compared with the guideline conformity to VdS 10000.
An ongoing process that we will continue in the future is the further digitization of processes with the help of the Workflow Generator. Working in and with Q.wiki has become indispensable in our company - thanks to the continuous improvement process, our employees will continue to benefit from our "cheat sheet" in the long term.
Create a free test account
- Gain full access to Q.wiki Now for 60 days
- No downlaod and no installation necessary
