Facing surging demand for flexible healthcare workers and stricter Wet DBA rules, TMI replaced its outdated manual planning process with bookU’s Connected Staffing solution. Cutting shift fills from 5 – 6 manual steps to one click and planner onboarding from three months to just thirty minutes. The result: TMI’s childcare division now runs with just two planners, who spend their time building relationships with care workers instead of chasing admin.
The flexible healthcare labour market in the Netherlands has undergone a structural shift since the COVID-19 pandemic. Care worker shortages accelerated the move toward flexible staffing, and post-pandemic recovery created a sustained surge in demand for temporary care professionals across childcare, elderly care, and mental healthcare.
At the same time, the enforcement of the Wet DBA (Deregulering Beoordeling Arbeidsrelaties) introduced stricter rules around self-employed workers. This pushed more care professionals into staffing agency structures, significantly increasing the volume of flexible workers that agencies need to manage, match, and plan.
More flexible workers. More shifts. More complexity. For TMI, this meant one thing: the old way of planning was no longer viable.
TMI is a Dutch healthcare staffing agency with a clear identity: people first. Flexible care workers trust TMI because the relationship feels personal. That human-first philosophy is a genuine competitive advantage, but behind that strength was a structural problem.
TMI's scheduling infrastructure had reached end-of-life. The day-to-day reality for planners was fragmented, slow, and entirely manual. Robin van der Putten, CFO and the internal driver of TMI's digitisation agenda, mapped out the challenge plainly.
“We clearly had the human touch. But we were nowhere near tech-enabled. ”
Robin Van der Putten Finance Director
| Multiple disconnected tabs | No unified view of open shifts, worker availability, or client status. Planners constantly switching between systems. |
| Single point of failure | One planner carrying the entire childcare operation. No redundancy, no scalability, no time for anything beyond task execution. |
| 5–6 manual steps per shift | Every fill required collecting, processing, proposing, confirming, re-entering, each step a potential failure point. |
| 3-month planner onboarding | Training a new planner on the legacy system took up to three months, concentrating critical knowledge in very few hands. |
TMI's search wasn't a simple procurement exercise. Robin and his team asked a bigger strategic question: where do we want to be in three to five years and which platform can actually get us there? They weren't looking for a CRM or a payroll tool. They needed what Robin called "full technical support with the human touch kept intact."
bookU's Connected Staffing sits at the planning layer; the layer where fill rates are won or lost. It connected TMI's existing front-office (CRM, ATS) and back-office (ERP, payroll) into a single automated planning engine, with a community app on the worker side.
You skip two, three steps we used to have every single time.
| Before bookU | With bookU |
| Multiple disconnected planning tabs | Single unified planning interface |
| Manual registration monitoring | Real-time push & email notifications |
| 5–6 steps per shift fill | 1 click or fully automated |
| Wait for client approval every time | Direct client portal confirmation |
| 3 months to onboard a planner | ~30 min to onboard a planner |
| No time for worker relationships | Time freed for community building |
| Scale = hire more planners | Scale = deepen relationships, not headcount |
When bookU automates the transactional work, planners don't become redundant. They evolve. The role transforms from manual task executor to strategic community orchestrator. Here's what that looks like in practice.
“It’s not about planning anymore. The planners have become commercial community builders. They’re not manually setting up every slot and sticking a name on it. That’s gone. Now they have time for the personal contact that actually makes the difference.”
TMI's childcare division now operates with just two people, not because the team was cut, but because two people with the right tools are genuinely sufficient for the volume. Those two people now call workers after their first shift, follow up on assignments, and build the kind of loyalty that makes workers choose TMI over the next agency.
In healthcare staffing, care workers choose their agency partly on relationship quality. The ability to follow up after a first shift, to ask how it went, builds retention in a market where worker loyalty is a genuine competitive moat.
⚡ The planning layer is where the business is won.
CRM and payroll tools matter, but fill rates are determined by what happens between the open shift and the confirmed worker. That's the layer worth investing in.
🔄 Automation changes the job, not just the speed.
The shift from manual planners to AI-powered community talent advisors doesn't happen by itself. It requires deliberate role redesign. The agencies that win are those that invest in that transformation, not just the technology.
🎯Onboarding friction is a signal.
If it takes three months to train a planner on your planning system, the system is the problem. Intuitive tools reduce knowledge concentration risk and enable your whole team to plan, not just the specialists.
❤️ Human touch scales when technology absorbs the transactional.
TMI's competitive edge, personal relationships with care workers, didn't disappear with automation. It deepened because planners finally had the time to act on it.
📈 Market pressure demands a platform answer.
Post-COVID demand growth and Wet DBA enforcement are structural, not temporary. Agencies still running on manual planning are not just inefficient, they're exposed.
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