A customized ERP system for municipal institution SWVO

SWVO's ERP system (iWmo) received a major upgrade thanks to its migration to Dynamics 365 Business Central and custom functionality.

Acknowledge has been managing and maintaining the enterprise resource planning systems(ERP) of Samenwerkingsverband Welzijnszorg Oosterschelderegio ( SWVO) for over ten years. On behalf of the member municipalities, this joint arrangement has made agreements to purchase care and support via the Social Support Act (Wmo) from the care providers who provide these services. In order to follow clients in all phases of the Wmo chain and to have the message traffic of care providers, municipalities and transport companies run electronically, SWVO uses iWmo, the information standard for data exchange within the Wmo. Thanks to Acknowledge's customization, iWmo connects to SWVO's Dynamics 365 Business Central. This allows SWVO to use all the standards of iWmo, the ERP system Business Central as well as the integration with the customized functionalities, such as forms and workflows, developed by Acknowledge.

Maturity in IT

Policy advisor Niels Peterson was put forward from SWVO as the contact person for the cooperation with Acknowledge. "IT got a much bigger role in recent years, especially in the core business. Acknowledge is a fine partner for this. They have the clout of a major player, but also offer flexibility for the customer, so you get things done fairly quickly. Because no good sparring partner was available on our side, we did have a knowledge gap. I jumped into that gap from my experience to see how we could streamline the cooperation with Acknowledge and become more mature as an organization in the field of IT. We have already taken significant steps in that regard." One of those steps is the transition from Dynamics AX to Business Central. SWVO also had the need to develop a number of new portals.

Thorough analysis

With the iWmo, SWVO supports a faster and more efficient deployment of care and contributes to a decrease in administrative burdens. In addition, iWmo is a reliable and sustainable source of information about Wmo care. So it is important that this platform continues to work well. "You want to have a solid back-end for that, where the back-end is well integrated and information is accessed in the right way," Niels explains. Our Dynamics team in Goes performed a thorough analysis on the current and desired situation. Based on this, an overview was made of all functionalities that needed to be migrated from the old to the new application. This formed the blueprint for the technical description of the new system.

Customization in Business Central

In addition to the migration from the existing environment, a number of new functionalities were also designed. "For this we used standard options in Business Central, but we also put down customizations for SWVO," says Dynamics 365 consultant Niek Brinkhuis. "We created tables and screens with associated validation, for example, which can be used to review an invoice." Thanks to the additions, a large number of business processes now run through Business Central, such as the entire financial administration, monitoring and validation of healthcare claims and data access from SharePoint and municipality portals. In addition, the Acknowledge consultants paid extra attention to the roles and rights structure within Business Central.

Live

Due to some capacity challenges at Acknowledge and because SWVO wanted to say goodbye to their other supplier as soon as possible, the project came under pressure. Niels: "We had to accept that we were going live with an incompletely tested product. The system did 95 percent of what it was supposed to do and the most important functionalities worked. Acknowledge was on standby for urgent problems that had to be solved immediately, so that users suffered as little as possible." Focus groups with users from the municipalities and care consultants provided input in advance about their wishes and needs for iWmo. After going live, these focus groups were used to evaluate whether the system was satisfactory. "Based on their input, the environment has already been significantly improved. The teething problems are out of the way and the processes have been tightened up," says Niels.

Joint entrepreneurship

Now that the project has calmed down, they are looking at what can be improved functionally. For example, SWVO needs more automations and wants to link other departments to the messaging and custom solutions. Two days a week, a Dynamics 365 consultant from Acknowledge is present at SWVO to think along from the functional side in order to get the most out of iWmo. She also trains SWVO employees in using the system. "It has required a lot from all parties, but have realized something beautiful," Niels says proudly. "The customization is cool and we have a system that goes beyond IT. We have established a formula that is going to help many municipalities and residents with a fine service. A piece of joint entrepreneurship within the public sector."