How Accent is winning the high-volume planning game

Ben De Block, Operational Director of Accent’s Dedicated division, built his career on the floor — starting as a consultant in a regional office fifteen years ago, opening one of the first Albert Heijn sites in Belgium, and eventually taking on all of Accent’s large accounts in hospitality and retail. When Accent built the Dedicated unit, they asked Ben to lead it. His mandate: build the strategy and find the tooling to make it work at scale.

After over a year of evaluating tools, Accent chose bookU.

The problem: double work, fragmented communication, no scale

Accent’s Dedicated clients shared a common operational pattern. Supervisors planned their workforce in Excel, on paper, sometimes on a whiteboard — then relayed that planning to Accent by email, phone, or printout. Accent re-entered it into their own systems. From there, planners built contracts and manually contacted workers by SMS, WhatsApp, or call to confirm shifts.

For cleaning clients — who may require workers to cover four, five, or six locations in a single day — the problem compounded. Planners had to read order slips line by line, re-type every detail, then manually communicate location-by-location instructions to candidates. No single source of truth. No structured flow. Just people bridging the gaps between disconnected systems.

At low margins, this cost is existential. Every administrative hour spent re-entering data is an hour that doesn’t generate revenue. Every miscommunication is a missed shift. And as Accent’s portfolio grows, the ceiling becomes clear: you cannot scale manual coordination.

The solution: one platform, end-to-end

Accent’s Dedicated division went live on bookU’s Connected Staffing platform starting with food and retail clients. Cleaning clients — the most complex use case — followed shortly after.

bookU connects to Accent’s CRM, ATS, and back-office in a single unified layer. Client requests flow in. Contracts flow out. Candidate notifications follow automatically. When a client’s planning is imported into bookU — whether from Excel, an email, or a connected system — contracts for existing workers are generated automatically within the same process. The worker receives a notification in their app within thirty minutes.

For cleaning clients, the platform goes further. Workers who cover multiple locations in a single day now receive digital work instructions per location: where cleaning supplies are stored, which products to use at each site, how to navigate each location. Previously, all of this was handled by SMS chains and verbal handoffs.

The result: time savings, better workers, and a path to scale

For Accent’s low-margin Dedicated accounts, the economics are direct. Ben’s estimate: if a client’s supervisor saves half a day per week by eliminating double data entry, that’s recurring administrative capacity freed at every account. Across 40 clients, the aggregate is significant — and it lets clients scale without adding headcount to their planning function.

The shift also changes the candidate experience. Workers receive shift confirmations, location details, and work instructions in their app, in one place, available at any time. For the “multi-jobbers” Ben describes — workers who deliberately combine a primary job with a flexible side role — this makes Accent’s shifts more attractive than those from agencies still running on SMS and phone calls.

Accent’s goal: full rollout to all 40 Dedicated clients by June 2026, followed by bookU’s Master Vendor Distribution module — which will allow Accent to take the lead position in large multi-agency tenders, managing shift distribution across partners and taking responsibility for overall delivery.

Why this case matters

Ben De Block is not a technology enthusiast who got excited about a new platform. He is an experienced operational leader who spent over a year evaluating tools before committing, and who has spent fifteen years learning where the real margins in staffing are won and lost.

His observation about the industry is worth sitting with: the entire staffing sector still largely operates the way it did 20 or 25 years ago. A vacancy arrives. Then the search begins.

The agencies that break from that reactive model — that build the infrastructure to find the right worker before the vacancy even exists — are the ones positioned to win the next decade. The planning layer is where that shift gets operationalised. bookU is the infrastructure that makes it possible.