Dorfner Gruppe is rolling ToolSense out branch by branch to replace paper, phone calls and Excel asset books with one digital platform that field teams actually adopt, and that gives finance and controlling a clean, location-aware view of every asset.
Dorfner is a multi-service facility management provider, cleaning, catering and plant maintenance across every discipline, operating in Germany, Austria and the Czech Republic from its Nuremberg headquarters. The group turns 75 next year. Vincenzo Montalto is its Chief Digital Officer, with nearly 27 years inside the business, a tenure he says is exactly what helps him understand what Dorfner needs next and where it wants to go, with the full backing of management.
The starting point
Like many companies with decades of history, Dorfner had grown its asset records organically, which in practice meant a lot of paper and a lot of Excel. The group ran proper asset accounting, but keeping it clean and audit-ready for tax advisers meant heavy manual effort and many people in the loop, alongside constant phone calls. Montalto is candid that this is the everyday reality not just in his sector but across much of German industry.
A second challenge is the workforce itself. Dorfner employs people of more than 18 nationalities, and not everyone is comfortable reading and writing German. The tradespeople and caretakers out in the field want to work with their hands, not sit at a PC or wrestle with spreadsheets, so any digital tool had to be genuinely low-threshold to land.
Why ToolSense
Montalto's philosophy is that digitalisation is driven neither top-down nor bottom-up but "from the middle of the company," by empowering the people who actually know where a process snags. He chose ToolSense partly because it lets those employees help shape the ideal process rather than have a fixed product imposed on them.
If a colleague knows where the process snags, where it can be improved, then they are also the one who has to tell us what the ideal process looks like, and that kind of co-design isn't possible in every product.
Vincenzo Montalto · CDO at Dorfner Group, Dorfner Gruppe
The platform also tackles the language barrier head-on by lowering the access threshold for a multinational workforce, a benefit Montalto rates as a major win on its own.
Operational impact
Everyone already had a phone; now they have the tool to go with it. Teams scan QR codes, report problems and see what task comes next, with much of the work running paperless and far more controlled. Assets can be tracked, though Montalto is deliberate about not over-tracking, the goal is clarity, not surveillance. ToolSense's asset management and field service workflows have simplified organisation, process and communication at the same time.
Adoption moved fast. The first branch went live "in no time" with a strong local project manager driving it, the second followed the same pattern, and a self-reinforcing momentum built as employees saw the value for themselves.
What's next
The bigger ambition is the paperless office and a steady reduction in bureaucracy. Once every branch and company is connected, Dorfner expects a solid foundation for asset accounting, tax advisers and controlling, knowing exactly where each asset sits, when it moves and when it is scrapped. The current job is the unglamorous one: bringing every individual along and implementing the system fully across the group, which Montalto expects to complete in the course of the next year, before tackling two or three further use cases already identified within the ToolSense platform.
