Good market position through a solid data foundation

The Dutch Replacement and Participation Fund (VfPf) advises and supports school boards in primary education to achieve a healthy, pleasant and safe working environment at school. VfPf does this by supporting school boards in preventing absenteeism and dismissal and limiting financial risks in the event of absenteeism and/or unemployment. School boards that are affiliated to VfPf cover financial risks arising from employment contract termination and absenteeism. In addition, VfPf provides job-seeking primary education staff with support in finding suitable vacancies and employment guidance.

Zeitungsverlage
Print-Auflage
Abo-Rückgänge
Digitalisierungsquote
Geschäftsmodell
Change-Konsequenz
Masterplan
Digital Change
Medienhäuser
Best Practices

VfPf is innovating itself and has drawn up a new strategy to this end. Part of this new strategy is the realization of a good data foundation with which a wealth of data is made available to the clients of VfPf, school boards and unemployed education personnel. Among other things, this provides insight into market trends, demographics but also region-specific insights that school boards can use. And this is just the tip of the iceberg! VfPf is currently conducting further research into how this data can be used even further to serve school boards and teaching staff even better.

Fulfilling this ambition involves two steps. The first step aims to further automate the premium determination for VfPf and adjust it qualitatively to the rhythm of school boards. "We can then estimate the premium better" said Hein Mak, manager of operations. "Now sometimes the premium has to be increased during the current year or, on the contrary, returned. School boards don't like that because schools are lump sum funded. A tight premium policy helps keep the financial administration in order."

The second step, which can already be started in parallel, is about the provision of services, which alleviate or even take over tasks entirely in school operations. These can be tasks in the areas of HR, finance and housing. These services will be fed from the data available within the BI/BA discipline of VfPf. Hein Mak: "We want to provide reliable data services and predictive information to school boards with which we can help them with their planning and operations. As an example: We see shrinkage in the number of pupils in your region because we see migration to the big city. But benchmark information is also provided. How are other schools doing compared to your own school?" In summary, VfPf sees itself as the ideal one stop shop for school boards and teaching staff in the area of operations and good planning.

Highberg (Formerly VKA) supported VfPf in drafting the requirements and wishes for the data platform. Defining these together with VfPf led to a clear picture of the desired final situation. Starting points here were the drafted sourcing strategy, desired information provision and data architecture for the data foundation. Central in the elaborations is a data warehouse, links with source systems, and of course the use and management of this information provision. Primary focus in the execution of this assignment was to regularly coordinate with stakeholders and to translate their ideas into a concrete program of requirements in order to realize a good data foundation for the end users. Themes such as privacy, security, data-science, strategic advice and architecture were discussed with the management team, procurement and other stakeholders, among others. Functional coordinator, Firdaus Iskandar "Highberg's deployment was experienced as pleasant and professional from the very beginning. Right from the start, they were one of us!" The result is therefore a supported program of requirements for the procurement of the BI/BA function.

For more information, please contact Wilbert Enserink.

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