The department Objection, Appeal and Mediation of one of the Dutch provinces processes all the objections, appeals and complaints concerning province-related issues. The process consists of the following steps: Data registration, phone contact, data collection, hearing, advice and decision. During each one of those steps data is registered. Furthermore it is of crucial importance that the processing of the cases occurs within a legally set period of time, for the province will be fined should a case not be processed in due time. Progress monitoring is therefore an important aspect. Every month, every quarter of a year and every year, management information about the processes is drafted in order to support the accountability process.
The province made use of a spreadsheet application to register the data. Initially this application was rather small but along the course of time it has developed into a mission-critical application.
The use of spreadsheet technology has lead to the following bottlenecks:
De province has investigated the possibilities of replacement, but this investigation showed that none of the standard systems met the requirements. Above all because the implementation as a traditionally programmed custom solution turned out to be too costly and too rigid. Therefore, the solution was provided by Anago: A customised system based on software assembly.
During two workshops the required functionality was addressed, thereby taking the original spreadsheet and the list with bottlenecks as a starting point. Besides the functionality also the user process and the related issue of authorisation were described.
By using the standard building blocks it only took a few weeks to model the application with Anago Assemble. The Anago application contains the following functions:
Furthermore, the Anago solution naturally provides a number of required functionalities: exporting to Excel and pdf; data importation; turning and tilting of tables; logging of changes in the data; back-up; authorisation and connections with different systems.
The Anago application facilitates simultaneous usage by multiple employees. Consequently, the unproductiveness as a result of waiting time is resolved.
The system produces automatic overviews, reports and monthly reviews. As a result, the monthly cycle of accountability-reporting does not cost any extra labour. The maintenance of the system, such as the adding of new processes and steps, is easily achieved through a maintenance component and is instantly practiced.
This way of progress monitoring has lead to the possibility of focusing at timeliness; with regard to the department as a whole, but also on the individual level of the employee. This has in turn lead to shorter running-times, less cases of exceeding the due time and hence, less fines.