Data warehouse, BI and AI: Alifa takes big steps in digitizing welfare work

“Our IT vision at Alifa is to create a user-friendly, human, and supportive IT environment that is stable, simple and uniform. We strive to make information transparent and organized for individual employees, teams, and management, in order to promote craftsmanship and make informed decisions together to support the residents of Enschede.”

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Introduction

About Alifa

Connecting with other people is a fundamental need. Alifa fulfills this need by bringing young people, seniors, volunteers, parents and children in Enschede together and thereby working for a happy city. The driving force behind the organization is therefore “Alifa Connects”.

From help with finances and parenting to activities for seniors or sporting events for young people: residents can come to Alifa with everything. Social work is very valuable, but how do you keep track of services and show the effects? That is one of the questions that Alifa struggled with, as this insight is important for its own work and accountability to other parties.

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The challenge

Separate applications

In the current IT architecture, there are many separate applications, making merging data for effects measurement a major challenge. As an employee, it is difficult to easily gain insight into information, and management faces the challenge of controlling progress and KPIs. That's why Alifa decided to look for innovative solutions that are future-proof, so that the digital landscape can be taken to the next level. For a fresh look and expertise in IT, the company entered into a strategic partnership with Flawless Workflow.

The collaboration focuses on the creation of a new IT landscape, with an eye for people and IT. This was the start of the “IT Connects” project, where the IT vision was formed in a collective meeting. This focuses on user-friendliness, humanity and support. Together, we strive to make information transparent and organized for individual employees, teams, and management. In this way, Alifa can focus on their expertise and making informed decisions to support the residents of Enschede, and Flawless Workflow provides the basis in IT.

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The solution

Data & AI platform

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More than 80 work processes discussed

The new IT landscape essentially consists of a new registration system, but the structure for the support teams is also being examined. Close involvement is very important here. In our collaboration, the short lines of communication are experienced as very valuable. From the start, weekly updates share the challenges, opportunities, insights and knowledge, in addition to continuing to look at the progress of the project. Another important aspect in creating the new IT environment is involving employees. With them, we discussed more than 80 work processes during our workflow analyses: from all separate services to processes behind the scenes. This also creates more support among employees for the changes. Based on these discussions and analyses, a series of gaps have been identified, which are followed up on the basis of IT or policy.

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Software Selection and Deployment

Alifa already had a preferred direction for a new registration system. We tested the shortlist and fit gap, tightened requirements and wishes and supervised the implementation. From setting up and working arrangements to adoption and training.

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Data warehouse as a central source of truth

Parallel to the implementation, we set up a data warehouse as a “single source of truth”.

• Sources connected: registration system, HR/finance (cloud), facility processes and other core systems.
• Data modeling & definitions: unambiguous KPI definitions, reusable data models and quality controls.
• Governance & security: roles/rights, logging and privacy-by-design so that data is used safely and responsibly.
  The data warehouse now reliably feeds reports and dashboards—without manually merging data.

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Business Intelligence & dashboards

Based on our BI roadmap, we developed the KPI tree for Alifa (from mission → goals → KPIs → data points).

• Dashboards: management reports, team overviews and impact measurements with a focus on topicality and comparability.
• Self-service: standardized data marts for rapid ad-hoc analyses.
• Continuous improvement: iterative releases based on team feedback.

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Innovate IT infrastructure

Supporting processes in HR and facilities have been digitized and automated where possible. The cloud migration makes management easier and increases availability and scalability. Everything is designed for simplicity and data-driven work, in accordance with the IT vision.

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Results

Centralization for insight and automation

With the implementation of the new registration system and data warehouse, Alifa has taken a big step towards an unambiguous and data-driven way of working.

• Registration system: Employees now register in one uniform way, which not only saves time but also ensures consistency and clarity between teams.
• Better collaboration: Teams now have direct insight into each other's activities, making mutual coordination faster and more efficient.
• Impact measurement: By connecting to the data warehouse, data is automatically brought together, which makes measuring effects and reporting to stakeholders considerably easier.
• Data quality & speed: Reports that previously required a lot of manual work are now immediately available and reliable, allowing decisions to be made faster and based on current data.
• Focus on craftsmanship: Spending less time searching or manually combining data means more attention to the work that really makes an impact for the residents of Enschede.

- Flawless implementation of a new Registration System, work and team insight

Successful introduction of a registration system that provides insight into the work and activities of employees.

- Informed decisions and measurable effects

IT support promotes data-driven work, making decisions and measuring impact.

- More focus on craftsmanship and core activities

Reduced search time with the new system leads to more attention to essential tasks and professionalism.

- BI dashboards, clear reports and innovative management opportunities

Dashboards provide insight into performance and areas for improvement, simplifying reporting for management.

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Continuation

Conclusion and outlook

The collaboration between Alifa and Flawless Workflow shows that a strategic approach to IT transformation provides immediate value in daily work. With the new registration system, the data warehouse as the central source of truth and the first BI dashboards, the basis has been laid for a fully data-driven way of working.

Next step? Use AI smartly to get even more value out of this infrastructure:

• Automatic summaries and management reports based on real-time data.
• Smart search functionality that allows employees to quickly find relevant policy information, work arrangements or case information.
• Data validation and classification to control and enrich registrations.
• Proactive identification of trends or risks so that action can be taken more quickly.

With this roadmap, Alifa is not only keeping up to date, but is actively taking steps towards a future where data, IT and AI together contribute to smarter, more efficient and more impactful welfare work.

“The importance of collaborating with Flawless Workflow is that we, as Alifa, are in a rapidly changing environment that we need to be able to continuously respond to. This means that we need insight to properly determine the course. We want our IT environment to support our work. This means that most of our time goes to our participants, we continue to comply with the Sociaal Werk Nederland quality label and that we continue to enjoy doing our work so that we retain the right employees.”

“So far, we have found the project to be very pleasant and useful. We gain insight into the various options for an appropriate IT infrastructure. An overview is provided and we help us think about what options there are, but also what the points of attention are for us. In addition, Flawless Workflow supports us well in discussions with our software suppliers.”

Mariella Scholten-Santese | Project and process director Alifa