6 TOPDESK MAGAZINE - MARCH 2016

CUSTOMER IN FOCUS

STREAMLINING
YOUR FACILITIES
AND IT PROCESSES
WITH TOPDESK

Arcus College has been located in its new, modern school building for a
year now. Since their move, Arcus has used TOPdesk to streamline all their
internal processes. Both IT and Facilities processes are set up in TOPdesk.
TEXT: MILOU SNATERSE PHOTOGRAPHY: AAD HOOGENDOORN 

8 TOPDESK MAGAZINE - MARCH 2016

TOPDESK IS THE COMMON
THREAD IN THE ORGANIZATION
Michel van den Berg
Functional application manager, Arcus College

Arcus College
Arcus College is a regional training centre for intermediate

from there. The consultant was really involved and

vocational education. The school has 8,000 students, 900

offered good solutions. And if he didn’t have an immediate

employees and many volunteers. Arcus offers over 200

answer, he logged a call or called a colleague to work

different courses, adult education and company trainings.

out a solution. Thanks to this collaboration, I have the

Education at Arcus is practical and future-oriented, with

feeling that I know the application inside and out,”

a large variety of courses. The school has a lot of training

says Van den Berg.

rooms. There is a soundproof studio where music students
can practice, a kitchen for cookery class students and
computer rooms where IT students can work.
Arcus college is a lively place. As you walk through the

The common thread in the organization
Arcus College uses Call and Reservations Management.

halls, you can see theatre students practicing their acting.

“Functional managers, timetablers, the Facilities

People from the neighbourhood visit the in-school store

department, services team, the central service desk, the

that sells bread from the student bakery. These neighbours

registrar’s office, Finance and STIP (student information

can also reserve a table in the restaurant where students

point) all work in TOPdesk, as well as our external caterer,”

both make and serve the food.

says Van den Berg. “Employees can use TOPdesk to reserve
coffee, tea and lunch. The caterer receives a reservation

A new school, a good tool set-up

request via TOPdesk and makes sure the reservation is
delivered. The same goes for Facilities. When needed, the

When the new building opened, the internal processes

caretakers can prepare reserved objects or set up rooms as

were also reorganized. The IT department at Arcus

requested. I can say that TOPdesk is the common thread in

already had TOPdesk running for ten years, but the tool

the organization.”

was not used to its full potential. With the arrival of a

Van den Berg works in the tool on a daily basis. “I believe

new building, they decided to start using TOPdesk more

that TOPdesk is a very accessible application to work with.

actively and implement it at the facilities departments.

The tool offers enough possibilities and the lay-out is truly

Michel van den Berg, TOPdesk functional application

user-friendly. When something does not work, I contact

manager at Arcus College, became the project’s

TOPdesk’s service desk and they always manage to help me.”

coordinator and worked together with a TOPdesk
consultant to implement TOPdesk.

Step-by-step implementation

All calls in TOPdesk
Van den Berg would like to have a TOPdesk registration
for all incoming calls to replace emails or requests in the

Van den Berg received a lot of help from the TOPdesk

hallways – something that still happens a lot. “When a

consultant during the tool implementation. “We first

call is registered in TOPdesk, everybody can see how this

needed to clear our entire TOPdesk environment,” says van

call is processed.” Another big advantage of TOPdesk is the

den Berg. “We then set up the basics and started working

extensive solution database, says Van den Berg. “When 

TOPDESK MAGAZINE - MARCH 2016 9

I NOW KNOW THE APPLICATION
INSIDE AND OUT
Michel van den Berg
Functional application manager, Arcus College

I receive a recurring question, I can easily find all calls in
TOPdesk that already have an answer to this question.
I use standard solutions to process calls, which saves me
a lot of time.”

The future
Van den Berg sees a number of specific points for
improvement for the future. “We have a service desk
where you can get notebooks, pens, batteries etc. We
would like employees to request these items via the
TOPdesk Self-Service Portal and not walk into the stock
room and grab what they need. The moment a request is
made in TOPdesk, a desk employee can directly prepare the
items. This way we also gain insight into what people use.”
Students can log calls and reserve rooms in TOPdesk,
but they do not do this actively yet because they are
not familiar with the tool. This is also something that
Arcus wants to work on. Finally, Van den Berg would like
to monitor more in the future. TOPdesk’s reports are
very suitable for this. “We currently lack incident and
change managers who can monitor things,” says van den
Berg. “I make a lot of reports myself to try to educate
management and my colleagues, but it would be even
more ideal when the operator’s team leads would focus
on this entirely.”