Get 75% of the costs restituted to improve your business processes or corporate culture!

Do you have plans to improve your business processes? Or do you want to create a healthy corporate culture where your employees are more productive until they retire? Are you considering hiring a external consultant to help you with these plans? In that case the grant ESF action E, Social Innovation, Vital Companies will be interesting for your company!

The European Social Fund is opening its social innovation budget to support companies that want to set up projects within the following two themes:

• Business process improvement: improve, rearrange and innovate the business processes, for example through LEAN manufacturing or Business Process Management.
• Sustainable employability: creating a cultural change, focused on healthy, vital and productive employment from the start of your employees’ career until their retirement:
  + Stimulating regional and intersectional mobility of employees;
  + (self)management of working hours ;
  + stimulating healthy, vital and safe employment; and
  + stimulating self-reliance at the workplace.

Every employer, small or big, and every project within these themes can submit a proposal. The company gets 75% of the costs of an external consultant restituted with a maximum grant of €18.000 and a minimum grant of €9.750. The company provides 25% of the project costs itself.

External consultant
Each applying company is free to choose their external consultant. The external consultant should however be able to hand in three personal references of different clients which proof experience and knowledge in the field of social innovation. Eligible activities of the consultant can consist of drawing up a diagnosis or advice for the applying company and/or testing and/or implementing a newly developed working method. Activities cannot be the training or coaching of employees or the development of tools.

Applications
From 3 October 2011 onwards applications for the ESF action E grant can be submitted. Funding is given on a ‘first come, first serve’ basis until the available budget is exhausted. Since many applications are expected to be submitted, it is recommended to submit your application as soon as possible. This will greatly increase your changes.

Registration
All applications have to be submitted online. The first step in the application process is an online registration. This can be done prior to the submission date of 3 October 2011. After checking the administrative facts, the applicant will receive a letter with a login code and password. These will be needed for submitting the application.

Due to the aforementioned expected high number of applications, we also recommended you to register as soon as possible if you are planning to apply for this grant. This will ensure that the application process is not delayed by waiting for the electronic autograph.

Other points of interest

• Employees need to be actively and demonstratively involved in the project.
• It has to be clear which external consultant of the chosen consultancy company is involved in the project. This consultant (and not the company) should be able to produce three references of similar projects in the application procedure.
• The project must be related to at least one of the themes. Nevertheless covering more elements is acceptable.
• The project will not take longer than nine months and will have to start within four weeks after receiving the subsidy approval. The subsidy decision is issued within six weeks after receiving the application.
• Third parties that act on behalf of the applicant need to be authorized. This authorization needs to be provided in the registration procedure.

Project examples
Many different kind of projects are possible within this grant. Please find below two examples of previously successfully submitted projects by Plus Projects:

• An organization in the field of money processing wanted to improve the internal money handling process with 10 to 30 percent, without any loss of quality or safety for the employees. Together with an external LEAN-expert the bottlenecks were identified and process improvements developed and tested.
• Policemen received a new digital solution with which information (images, text recordings, etc.) through a live-stream connection is continuously transmitted for processing to a back office. As a result, a change of the existing work processes was needed. Different police teams investigated how the new way of processing information could be implemented in their daily routine.

Applications can be submitted from 3 October 2011 until 31 December 2012. After completing a project, a proposal for a second project can be submitted (as long as the available budget is not yet exhausted).

For more information you can contact Judith Deckers from Plus Projects via T 070 301 2420 or deckers@plusprojects.nl