About the Carante Group
The Carante Group is a consortium of twelve autonomous, regional foundations that are active in the care sector. These organizations work together through their 20,000 employees to provide care, guidance and support, tailored to the needs of their 25,000 clients. The Carante Group is active in the care sector and provides services to people with a physical and/or mental disability, psychiatry, care of the elderly, welfare and youth assistance, in other words care in the widest sense.
“The consortium is primarily intended to provide benefit to the individual foundations in the field of business management and support. We are always looking for synergy, especially in the Business Intelligence field,” said Joris van Wijngaarden, Director of Finance and Information Technology.
The Carante Group does not carry out joint financial administration and no consolidation takes place: each foundation has its own finance department that all use the same – centrally managed – application. The Directors of the 12 foundations form the Board of Directors, the highest organ of the group where the decisions are taken.”
BI Self Service
Cees van der Linde is BI Manager at the Carante Group. “Our team is 12 years old and now has nine people. We built and further developed the BI environment with IBM Cognos; around 1,100 employees use the system.” All reports, scorecards and dashboards were centrally built. However, Van der Linde noticed that the demand from the users was changing: they wanted to do more themselves. “Then you have to choose another form of collaboration. Together with Passionned Group we want to design a BICC structure in which the different BI roles are properly coordinated. We are also examining what self-service BI means for users in the field of process, knowledge and training.” In addition, Van der Linde sees an increasing demand for data mining and analytics, whereby the range of BI capabilities continues to grow. “This adds even more to the work pressure. We will have to organize BI differently.”
Quality of care in BI
Quality has become very important in the last two years, which prompted the Carante Group to work on an Electronic Client File. “For this we need as the BI team to produce quality information and all sorts of indicators,” says Van der Linde. “On the one hand because the legislation and regulations require it, on the other hand, because as an organization we understand that we need to improve the processes to be able to increase customer satisfaction. Where we once started out from the financial information, you now see that the primary process is once more at the heart of the information. That is one of the reasons we started this project with Passionned Group.”
Business Intelligence Tool evaluation
Together with Marc Wijnberg, Van der Linde and Van Wijngaarden have developed a BI vision and BI strategy and we started a tool evaluation. “Although we have been using IBM Cognos for years, our starting point is not the tool but rather what the foundations want. When we are clear on that, we will compare it with the Passionned Group BI & Analytics Guide. The rest will follow automatically. Also, BI and the BI tools have been further developed in recent years.” The fact that Passionned Group is not affiliated with any supplier or product is an important aspect of this process.
The focus is on self-service BI and what Passionned Group calls the BI framework. “We call it the 80-20 variant, because we want to make more use of reusable components. For example, inflow and outflow of staff, sick leave percentage, those are reusable indicators,” says Van der Linde. “For now we are working together with Passionned Group and feel that, step by step, we are getting closer to our goal.”
Daan van Beek MSc, speaker, trainer and author of the BI & AI book 'Data Science for Decision-Makers and Data Professionals'. He is the CEO of the Passionned Group and you can follow Daan on Twitter.
