Outsourcing to sheltered workshops

Marcel van der Voort | Outsourcing Manager
"It is a win-win situation. By outsourcing work to sheltered workshops, we can focus on our core activities, and people in the sheltered workshops have a chance to develop further."

The demand for our systems in both the horticultural and the solar sectors has been growing explosively in the past years. This was associated with challenges: 

• How can we optimise production to meet this demand?
• How can we respond to a sudden drop or increase in demand?
• How can we spread the risks?
• Should we scale up or outsource? And what are the consequences of this?

In which we continuously asked ourselves the underlying question: how can we conduct this business sustainably?

The answer turned out to be nice and effective: outsourcing to sheltered workshops.

"We were already a bit familiar with outsourcing to sheltered workshops, but we professionalized our procedures in recent years. Now, each month, an average of 300 people work for us at different sheltered workshops. Taking the part-timers into account, this amounts to 150 people working for us on a daily basis.

Usually, they do mounting tasks, or sawing-punching processing and packaging. We are currently working with six different sheltered workshops, each with its own speciality. And they are all located within a 20km radius of  our headquarters in Monster. In this way, we can make our contribution to society regionally."

"Three years ago we outsourced the mounting work for 250,000 'Valk products' to sheltered workshops monthly. Currently, this has reached 1,000,000 products. So as long as we are growing, as far as we are concerned, they are growing with us!"

Watch below what inspired Marcel van der Voort (Van der Valk Systemen) and René van der Gaag (Den Haag Werkt) to work together. And see our outsourcing colleagues at work!