Find subsidies: flexible digitization of a “people business”
Flexible digitization of a “people business”
After more than 15 years of experience in the subsidy world, Roelof van der Klaauw, senior consultant, joined Find subsidies, gradually focusing his focus from the operational process to IT and operation. This earned him the title “Bat-man”: the man of the Business Automation Technology. In this project, Roelof acted as client.
“The goal of Vindsubsidies is to become the most digital agency in the market,” he says. “Subsidy advice is a busy market, with a few major players and hundreds of freelancers, but none of those parties can do what we can do. We are not only a consulting firm, but also a software and data supplier. In addition to our advice business, we also have a database of subsidy schemes, a commercial newsletter explaining what new opportunities there are and an advanced tracking system for grant applications.”
Vindsubsidies also serves the other side: that of the governments and institutions that provide the subsidies. Vindsubsidies offers them a system that allows them to manage not only the issuance of subsidies, but also accountability for use and efficiency.
Roelof van der Klaauw
Bat-man at Vindsubsidies
Not easy to standardize
For more structured processes, Vindsubsidies already had software in-house in the form of a CRM platform and a financial system. The challenge lay in the service process. The more than 100 critical, independent and highly experienced consultants at Vindsubsidies all have their own way of doing that work. And that is also necessary, because contact with customers, writing grant applications and reporting on them cannot simply be standardized or automated.
All these different working methods did make it difficult to keep an overview and to transfer work. Because Vindsubsidies are growing rapidly through company takeovers, new ways of working were also added over and over again. So the company needed a way to digitally support the consultants, standardize processes and gain control. But it didn't want to give up the flexibility that consultants need to do their job well.
Package software or customization?
“Of course, we looked in the market,” says Roelof. “But I actually knew that there was no standard solution that could do what we wanted. Standard packages lack the features we need, so we had to build custom solutions. Licenses are expensive, and you also pay for far too many features that you don't use. Building it yourself also has the great advantage that you have your own best practices can be incorporated into the software.”
But at the same time, there were concerns about starting a custom software project. After all, how do you keep a grip on budget, time and scope?
With the people at Blis Digital, I thought: those guys get that.”
“Through our investor, we came into contact with Blis Digital and after a few hours of talking, we already had an outline of a solution that was sure to work.”
How do you automate a people business?
Subsidy advice is human work. “An artisan company,” Roelof calls it. “We've been relying on the excellence and experience of our consultants for 20 years. You don't just convert that into a set of software specifications. With the people at Blis Digital, I thought: those guys get that.”
During a so-called Sprint 0, we worked with Vindsubsidies to come up with a solution that would be easy to adapt if work processes changed or turned out to differ, while everything was standard enough to make transfer easier and to give the management of Vindsubsidies more control over what was happening in the company.
Ultimately, this was the scope of this project:
- A portal for consultants to manage planning, tasks and documents
- A dashboard with data about all processes and projects
- Development of a customer portal, where consultants were able to share documents and information with their customer
- The technical platform that makes the above possible in a safe, maintainable and flexible way
We supported Vindsubsidies in using the new software, but the company took care of most of the adoption, migration and training itself.
Standard where possible, customization where necessary
To gather the specifications for the system, we brought the entire company together. We incorporated all input into an interactive prototype, which everyone was then allowed to provide feedback on. Once that was processed and validated, we built the platform out of standard components as much as possible. Task management, planning and document management, for example, are available as standard in Microsoft 365. In our view of this platform, Microsoft Teams acted as a front end, enhanced with a number of customized integrations. We integrated everything via APIs, so that each component can easily be replaced with something new in the future. We also achieved the customization that was necessary with this philosophy.
Low-code and budget
Where possible, we opted for low-code development on the Power Platform in this project. To be honest, the impact of low-code development on the project budget may in practice fall short of the promise, but it yielded a lot of profit in this project. This is mainly due to the rapid integration with standard components. Microsoft Planner, with various views, filters and integration with Power BI and Outlook calendars as standard, was very easy to use as a solution for task management.
And because you can work with templates in Power Platform — and therefore don't have to design and build data models — you can innovate quickly. We've now created a template for a project type that visits thousands of times a year, with a set of standard tasks included. This provides a lot of efficiency.
Roelof is very pleased with our approach:
“Blis Digital saw a route where we were able to avoid many of the challenges of customization by working with standard building blocks. But they then combine them into software that is completely customized, without feeling pulled together.”
In practice, however, integrating with external systems is always difficult. You won't discover the technical details until you really dive into it. Even a preparatory process cannot protect you 100% from that. Retrieving data from other systems, for example, always shows inconsistencies in that data. For example, we saw that projects were sometimes double-introduced or that it was not entirely clear which legal entity or holding company belonged to which customer name. We had to clean that up. But even minor inconsistencies, such as the spelling of company names, can have unexpected consequences.
Because there sometimes full-code development was necessary, this project ultimately became a textbook example of the power of fusion development: the optimal combination between low-code and full-code.
More structure and a basis for growth
The result: a platform that provides structure to the advisory work and enables Vindsubsidies to achieve the far-reaching digital ambitions. “A robust investment that will contribute to future growth,” Roelof calls it. “We now have one fixed, future-proof method for working with tasks and documents. We can modify this ourselves, because it is not created in code but in templates. The customer portal makes interacting with customers much more professional and effective.”
But the new platform is also the basis for future innovation. With all documents in one place and in a standard framework, adjusting, automating or adding business processes becomes much easier. And the ambition to work more with customers via the customer portal is getting closer. In the current version, the customer can view the status of requests, but there will be opportunities for real communication and collaboration, so that a customer can also upload, approve or supplement documents there.
In addition, the platform already provides data about the internal processes, which Vindsubsidies can use for optimization: which process steps cost the most work? Where do we lose the most lead time? Answers to these questions help the company to further perfect the processes.
Do you want to know more about the platform we created for Vindsubsidies? Or do you want to know what we can do for you?
