The Driestar-Wartburg School Group partnered with Salure to optimize their AFAS system.
Smart mergers, smarter automation
A merger gives the necessary headaches, including administrative ones. Two secondary school communities in South Holland know this better than anyone else: they merged in 2021 to form a school group with 7,500 pupils. Salure had the honor of overseeing the large-scale system overhaul of AFAS and the extensive automation of its business processes.
At both high schools – Driestar College and Wartburg College – student numbers were declining. Furthermore, they were unwittingly in each other’s catchment area. “To keep us both viable, merging seemed like a good solution,” explains business controller Hans Krijger of the decision.
The mission of both schools was the same, to provide Christian secondary education on a Reformation basis.
Krijger: “Competition in the region where our students come from only got in the way of carrying out our mission, whereas we wanted to strengthen it.”
It resulted as of April 2021 in School Group Driestar-Wartburg. Together the organization has twelve branches, spread over Gouda, Rotterdam, Dordrecht, Lekkerkerk and Leiden. All together, the school group has about 1150 employees.
Ineke, Gerdien and Hans
Familiar relationship
Once the merger was a reality, it called for a redesign of the personnel, salary and financial administration systems of both schools. As process facilitator, Driestar-Wartburg chose Salure.
Both Wartburg and Driestar had been working with Salure for many years. In 2015, when Driestar College switched to AFAS, Salure did the setup and consultancy; the Wartburg had been working on the redesign of AFAS InSite since 2017 and SalureConnect implementation since 2018.
This data analysis platform is a Salure-developed addition to AFAS’ business software. It connects to various systems, such as the hours and salary administration. And, in the case of schools, also with student administration systems and schedule administration. SalureConnect continuously imports current data from all those linked systems, and displays them clearly in a dashboard for management information.
Yet that choice for Salure was not a foregone conclusion: the award was made through a tendering process. Krijger: “Our procurement policy prescribes a minimum of three parties to tender for such large processes. That’s why we appointed a selection committee.”
Those invited included Salure, as an existing relationship. “That Salure was subsequently awarded the contract was tied to director Paul van Hengel’s convincing story of how Salure was going to execute the project.”
Hélène Weststrate
As a tip for other merging schools and organizations, business controller Hans Krijger of Driestar-Wartburg wants to emphasize the importance of change management: “Beforehand, we convened many sessions with employees, some of which were supervised by Salure. In those sessions, we thought together about the existing and desired situation. From there, we collected all the wishes and concerns, as a basis of how our organization would like it. “
When it came to signing up students, for example, the processes at the two schools ran quite differently, it turned out. “As a result, we had to search for a long time to find a workable workflow for the entire merger organization.“
The commitment to support did not mean that the Driestar-Wartburg merger project group could honor all wishes. “You also have to deal with legislation, so we did sometimes have to adjust expectations and make our own choices. Otherwise you keep having discussions. In communication, you have to respond to that, to bring people into that.”
AFAS Users
A pleasant starting point was that both schools were already working with AFAS even before the merger. “One advantage of my double job at both schools,” analyzes Krijger: after serving as head of finance at Wartburg College, he was given the position of business controller at both Driestar College and Wartburg College in 2011, fifty-fifty at both schools.
Wartburg College was first introduced to AFAS back in 1999. Krijger: “At that time, this only involved the AFAS financial module; we used another package for salary administration. But that program was rather expensive and laborious. Moreover, it didn’t function well for us.”
In 2013, Wartburg therefore also brought payroll to AFAS. This was possible because AFAS now supported the collective bargaining agreement for secondary education. Driestar College then switched to this as well in 2015. Krijger: “This was partly due to my positive experiences with AFAS. Furthermore, a possible future merger with Wartburg was already playing a bit in the background.”
For multiple administrative processes of the two organizations, Salure had to set up one new environment. Salure began in 2022 with the personnel, salary and financial administration and the following year with additional administrative set-up of the privacy register, quality assurance, registration of company property and incident reporting through our Service Point, among others.
The application process was also set up in 2023. This process previously still ran entirely outside AFAS. “The procedure for recruitment and selection has been one big workflow since May 2023. That takes some getting used to, because those are gigantic processes, in which you continue to adjust details for a very long time and include user experiences in the ongoing improvement of the setup.”
Krijger liked the cooperation between the school and Salure. “We had very good consultants involved in setting up the many workflows, such as Peter, the project manager at the time. All the people at Salure we worked with wanted the best for the customer. “
The ultimate test moment, the launch of the new environment, is always exciting. For clients, but just as much for Salure itself. Especially with a project as complex and extensive as this one. Krijger: “That happened to us in January 2023. And fortunately everything worked well from the start, without any major problems. We also received positive reactions to this from the staff.”
Hans Krijger
Faster shifting
Gerdien Mol, financial administration employee, says she has had little trouble making the switch. “For our department, the difference was mainly in the new general ledger accounts and budget codes.”
For the P&O department, the step was bigger. For Ineke Hage, senior human resources and payroll clerk, the application workflow in particular stands out positively: “It was quite a challenge to align this workflow as much as possible with the working methods within the various locations. The great thing is that we now have good insight into the entire process of recruitment and selection.”
In addition, she sees it as a great advantage that once appointed, the hiring process is completely digital. “We no longer receive separate documents that we then have to scan in.”
Hélène Weststrate, P&O policy officer, concurs: “It helps that the processes, including those around recruitment and selection, are largely automated. This allows you to switch faster and better between the applicant and the organization.”
The months after Jan. 1, 2023, until the summer break, the project group used to further perfect the operation of the AFAS system. Krijger: ” In the current period, the fall of 2023, we are linking the class schedule and personnel and payroll. Along with the necessary links for management information on SalureConnect.”
The parent data in the student records is already linked to the accounts receivable list in AFAS; therefore, the parent data in the student records is the same as in AFAS. A new employee automatically results in a new creditor. “Again, that saves operations.”
Hélène, Ineke and Hans
Pile of mail
In the further automation of business processes, Salure continues to guide the school group. Krijger: “We want to use the AFAS system as optimally as possible to support and organize standard internal and administrative processes. We do that a lot with workflows. These oblige our colleagues to perform specific activities in a fixed order. Sometimes we have to get used to this; not everyone likes it. But the risk of error is greatly reduced and you have a much better overview of the ongoing actions. On balance, workflows work faster and more efficiently than manual handling, although sometimes it doesn’t feel that way to our people.”
As an example, Krijger cites the handling of procurement invoices. In the past, before 2010, that was an entire process, he recalls. “Purchase invoices came in and were distributed through internal mail to the people who needed to sign off on them; everyone had stacks on their desks.”
In a workflow that works much easier: “Now a purchase invoice or an expense claim can often be approved and ready for payment within a day. We saved a lot of time on that item at the time.”
But not only there: all leave requests, sick reports and declarations now also run through workflows in AFAS. “Because of our joint experience with AFAS from before the merger, we were able to set up the new environment even more efficiently, so we were able to achieve a significant improvement here as well.”
Driestar-Wartburg further uses the AFAS Pocket app, which gives employees direct access to the school’s HRM system. This allows them to book leave, send in notifications and view their paychecks from their phones. “As a result, part of the administration has since then been solely in the hands of the employees, whereas they have a much better handle on it themselves.”
Three Star Wartburg on Salure:
As far as Krijger is concerned, Salure’s performance deserves to be recommended to other schools. “I look back on a good project.” That does not mean there were no areas for improvement, both Salure and the business controller feel.
Especially at the beginning of the project, planning did not always prove easy organizationally. For Salure, this was a learning point to plan more realistically. Krijger: “Nowadays that goes much better. But what also made a big difference back then was that the people at Salure are really willing to do their best for the client.”
