Werkzaak Rivierenland (The Rivierenland Employment Organization), set up in 2016 by a group of eight municipalities in the Rivierenland region, helps job seekers with poor employment prospects by providing income support or employment in specially adapted environments. The organization’s core missions are to increase the number of suitable jobs, boost the number of potential employers in the Rivierenland region and reduce the amount of unemployment benefit paid out. According to founder and director Elfriede Boer, data is vital to the achievement of these goals. “We have been systematically working towards these goals ever since we established the organization in 2016. To achieve them, it is crucial that we have access to up-to-date information at all times.”
Responsibility for this information was allocated to Werkzaak Rivierenland’s business analyst: “We use a number of BI tools and source systems within Werkzaak Rivierenland and the municipalities with which we collaborate also use their own systems,” explains the business analyst. “It was therefore a huge challenge to convert all of this data into usable information and present it to our employees in a simple and accessible manner. To give us control and insight regarding the use and clarity of the data, we introduced a business intelligence system.”
Werkzaak Rivierenland started to roll out a number of Qlik dashboards in order to account for its activities to the participating municipalities. “These dashboards greatly facilitated our everyday operations and gave us substantial insight into the past,” explains WR’s business analyst. “We wanted to do more with data, effectively switching from hindsight to foresight and from information to optimization. To achieve this, we decided to set up a strategic partnership with MagnaVersum at the end of 2017. They supported us with a complete data and analytics package covering everything from delivering and implementing a modern data warehouse to organizing workshops to boost our data literacy. The ultimate goal of this partnership was to achieve entirely data-driven operations.”
Rick Ouwerkerk, MagnaVersum’s Chief Business Officer adds that, “the situation at Werkzaak Rivierenland is commonplace. Many organizations are taking tentative steps to gain greater insight into their data via dashboards. This is a good first step, although in the long-term, some situations can prove more future-proof than others. To effectively manage an organization in a smart and data-driven manner demands solid yet flexible foundations for data management and data visualization provided by tools such as TimeXtender and Qlik. It is also vital to work towards a ‘data culture’ in which everyone understands the importance of data and how to use it in their everyday duties. This is exactly what we are striving to achieve with Werkzaak Rivierenland.”
TimeXtender certainly lives up to its name as it saves us a huge amount of time. We can now access our data ten times quicker than before and the data flows are fully automated, giving us much more time to focus on our strategic objectives.”
Business analist, Werkzaak Rivierenland
“The cornerstone of an effective data management system is a single integrated platform in which all business information is managed and prepared for data visualization, advanced analytics and artificial intelligence,” explains Rick Ouwerkerk. “This saves organizations a colossal amount of time and money and helps them become a data-driven enterprise in compliance with the strictest data security and privacy standards. To achieve this, MagnaVersum works together with TimeXtender. TimeXtender provides tried and trusted technology constructed with the future in mind.”
As Werkzaak Rivierenland’s business analyst explains, MagnaVersum’s strategic approach has proven to be exactly what was needed. “Since we implemented TimeXtender, our business intelligence and analytics have become phenomenally effective. We can rapidly connect and model new sources of data and our organization is much more capable of responding to unforeseen circumstances. For example, we were able to adapt to the COVID-19 crisis in practically no time at all. A number of new social support schemes were set up that we had to execute on behalf of the municipalities, such as the temporary support scheme for self-employed professionals. Within a single day, we had access to all of the data we needed to provide information on the status of all applications. Using this dashboard, we were able to see how many applications had been submitted, how many were still ongoing, how many extensions had been requested and how much had been paid out in total. TimeXtender’s flexibility allowed us to link almost all data sources that we could think of and then connect, model and prepare the data within a solid and secure system.”