Customers

DELA

DELA Logo"With Business Objects, we are in a position to uncover important management information."

Stanley Pietersen
Staff Member of Funeral Care
DELA

Challenge

Funeral insurer and carer DELA is known to everyone in the Netherlands and Belgium. The company insures and arranges funerals and cremations and offers assistance in the period afterwards. Established over 70 years ago, DELA stands for "Carries Each Other's Troubles." It is the market leader in the Netherlands and Belgium when it comes to funeral insurance and care. DELA's aim is to offer a worthy and equal funeral care to its members and co-insureds

A funeral includes many organizational arrangements that have to go smoothly and without problems. This requires specific qualities in a funeral provider, which DELA makes every effort to be able to offer. Innovation is the keyword and IT plays an important role here, ensuring that people are supplied with the right information at the right time. For good reason, DELA scrutinizes its IT systems and procedures and makes the necessary improvements.

DELA needed to ensure that processes to run as efficiently as possible. It switched to a workstation environment, resulting in an open and attractive office environment that is pleasant for the employees to work in. DELA needed the flexibility of running its applications on each workstation, including BusinessObjects™ from Business Objects, an SAP company. DELA has used BusinessObjects since 1995 to produce reports.

Approach

The transition to a flexible working environment required applications on each workstation to be used by everybody. This was also true for the for the BusinessObjects solution. IT specialist Bas van Heusen says, "To prepare for the flexible working environment, in the course of 2006 we switched to the Web-based version of the BusinessObjects XI platform. There were two reasons for this. First, management decided that all new applications should be Web-based in order to simplify administration and optimize the concept of flexible workstations. Further, we will be generating electronic reports more and more. We have used BusinessObjects for many years to our complete satisfaction. So for us, this was a logical choice."

As far as DELA is concerned, a number of issues were crucial when the decision was made to switch to a new environment. The system needed the capability to easily obtain information from the source system and be user-friendly. Moreover, the data error frequency had to be limited to the minimum. Van Heusen says, "It's certainly of great importance in our line of business to have the correct data, especially if you look at the number of funerals that we handle—about 22,000 per year. With BusinessObjects, we have up-to-date and accurate information."

At the end of 2005, DELA decided to switch to the Web-based solution of BusinessObjects. IT specialist Rogier Hesen says, "Initially we carried out a survey to see how many reports were in circulation. Which reports need to be migrated to the new environment and which had not been used for a long time? More than 750 reports used in the different departments were migrated. Now there are about 100 left out of that." In order to standardize the procedures as much as possible DELA examined the infrastructure of the different departments within the company, as well as that of its subsidiaries, which include Goetzee Rotterdam and In Pace DELA. Then a pilot phase was implemented, in the course of which it transferred reports from each department of the company to the new application.

One of the departments where BusinessObjects is put into action is the department of funeral care. There, BusinessObjects is part of the computerization of the whole funeral chain where everything is kept up-to-date, from reporting a funeral and the commencement of the funeral care to the final settlement and payment. With these arrangements, DELA works with different parties, like cemeteries, crematoria, transporters, mortuaries, printers, and caterers.

It's important for DELA that it has an overview of all these third parties. Stanley Pietersen, a staff member of the Funeral Care department, says, "We would like to know, for example, the average funeral costs, costs charged to which other parties, the return on certain services, and if the benefits are correct. We would also like to observe trends in order to see if we should adapt our package of services or our price structure. It's of importance to us to be able to get these kinds of information out of our system. BusinessObjects enables us to do that. We now have much better operational information."

Results

BusinessObjects is actively used in marketing as well. Internet marketer Tim Nijhuis says, "We have as many as 2.7 million policyholders to whom we do a lot of up-selling through direct mail. We use BusinessObjects to put together queries. We make selections, for instance, on the basis of certain client profiles or on the basis of the product that they've already purchased. Before the transfer to the BusinessObjects web application, we had to request the IT department to run queries for us." He adds, "There are of course disadvantages to this method—for instance, that you have to 'translate' to IT what your wishes are. As result, there is always information loss."

Now with the Web version, we have all received training which enables us to make these selections ourselves. And we are very happy with this; we can now run queries whenever we want and we are no longer dependant on the IT department. Moreover, we've noticed that you get more out of the file when you run queries yourself and get to work with the data. With BusinessObjects, we now know our client better." DELA received training before starting to use BusinessObjects. Nijhuis says, "That worked really well. The training program was adapted to your own situation. You worked with your own data by which you could very clearly see what you do and what the possibilities are. BusinessObjects is very accessible, which makes work pleasant. We are very satisfied."

IT specialists van Heusen and Rogier Hesen agree with that assessment. "BusinessObjects also has clear advantages in the field of IT," says van Heusen. "The new Web application ensures that administration is considerably reduced. We can manage the application remotely and the roll-out is very simple. We send the user a link and he or she can get to work. Besides, the reporting now takes place in a central point, instead of being spread over the whole organization. Changes are carried out centrally. The result is that the whole organization works with one and the same correct version."

DELA uses BusinessObjects for reporting on the insurance administration system, the mailing system, and funeral care—wherever reporting is needed. DELA is now able to obtain important operational information from each workstation in the company. In addition, administration is considerably simplified, resulting in DELA saving costs.

Although the IT department still plays a major role in compiling reports, this will change in the future. Van Heusen says, "The idea is that users in the future will do more themselves. In the past, we made much use of key users per division within the company. In the future, we want to achieve that the business does more itself, so that there is much more interaction between IT and the users of BusinessObjects. That is what we will focus on in the coming period. This is possible with BusinessObjects. The user-friendliness of this package will enable us to achieve this in the not-too-distant future."

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