E-mergo develops AWVN data portal

The General Employers' Association of the Netherlands (AWVN) has launched a new data portal for its members. With the data portal, AWVN aims to professionalize and digitalize its services to members. Through the data portal, employers and industry associations that are members of AWVN gain access to various dashboards and benchmarks with information on collective labor agreements (CAOs), remuneration, social plans, mobility and pensions. E-mergo is AWVN's digitalization partner and developed the data portal for them with Mendix. In this blog, we discuss the digitalization challenges and how the data portal can support AWVN's digital ambitions.

About AWVN

AWVN was founded in 1919 to negotiate working conditions with trade unions on behalf of its member companies. Today, AWVN is the largest employers' service organization in the Netherlands, and its advisors guide more than 1,000 employers on every aspect of being an employer.

AWVN's services include an extensive package of advisory services on an invoice basis. In addition, AWVN offers its members various data services (dashboards, benchmarks and tools) that are delivered through different channels. This requires a lot of data. AWVN collects that data itself and also asks its members to supply data.

'The CBS of employment conditions'

AWVN has the ambition to become "the CBS (Statistics Netherlands) of employment conditions". It wants to achieve this by combining the data it holds and using it for new and innovative data-driven services. The new data portal plays an important role in this. With it, AWVN wants to take the next step in professionalizing its services, by bringing various digital products together in one central platform and making the data directly accessible to members.

For AWVN, the data portal makes it possible to roll out new digital services faster. For members, the portal should offer greater ease of use and better insights. In the future, members will be able to purchase new services through the portal themselves.

AWVN's challenges

AWVN's digital products were developed by various external parties using different technologies. The life cycle of these products is relatively short, and they were mostly built as monolithic applications. As a result, modifying the applications is time-consuming and difficult, and they have to be rebuilt at the end of their life cycle. In the old situation, AWVN struggled with a number of challenges and bottlenecks that stood in the way of its digitalization goals:

• Data was collected in different ways and not stored centrally.
• The existing applications are not integrated with each other and do not share a consistent user interface.
• The applications quickly become outdated, and rebuilding them costs time and money.
• To modify existing applications, AWVN depends on various external parties.

These challenges were the reasons for AWVN to build the data portal with Mendix, Qlik Sense and TimeXtender.

Why Mendix as the low-code platform

AWVN chose Mendix as the low-code platform for developing new customer-oriented applications, of which the data portal is the first. The term "low-code" refers to the way applications are developed. With Mendix, applications are built in a visual drag-and-drop interface, where the user interface, data model and application logic are modeled using building blocks (standard components). Thanks to this visual way of developing and the extensive set of standard components, there is no need to hand-code, so applications can be rolled out much faster than with traditional development methods.

Want to know more about the benefits of low-code development? Then read our ebook.

The AWVN data portal

The data portal has been developed as a website for anonymous visitors and for employers that are affiliated with AWVN, either directly or indirectly (via an industry association). Anonymous visitors see a general landing page with information about AWVN's services. Employers who are not yet members can request access via a button in the portal. AWVN members log in via OKTA (a cloud identity provider) to gain access to a number of dashboards.

The dashboards were developed with Qlik Sense and are displayed (embedded) within the portal. Qlik Sense dynamically filters the data in the dashboards based on the logged-in user (row-level security). As a result, each user only sees what they are allowed to see.

The AWVN data portal start page

The dashboards are organized into four themes: CAO, Remuneration, Pensions and Mobility. These themes are shown as tiles on the start page. After choosing a theme, one or more new tiles are displayed, containing information about the dashboard and a button to open it. The dashboards are fully interactive, meaning users can adjust selections, filters and visualizations to their liking. Qlik Sense loads the datasets for the dashboards from AWVN's data warehouse, which was developed with TimeXtender.

The portal has an administration environment where AWVN employees can edit the content within the portal themselves, such as the text in the tiles and in various pop-up windows. In addition, an administrator can set per theme which tiles are displayed in which order and which dashboard should open for each tile.

A CAO dashboard in the data portal

First experiences and future plans

E-mergo delivered the first version (Proof of Concept, or POC) of the data portal in 10 weeks. E-mergo also handles the further development and maintenance of the application. The first version made the dashboards for the CAO and Remuneration themes available. A pilot with a small number of selected AWVN members started in early March. The initial responses were very positive, especially about the fact that all relevant information and insights can be accessed from one central web environment in a simple, consistent and secure way. After the pilot phase, the intention is for all AWVN members to get access to the application, and for the portal to be expanded further with new dashboards, benchmarks and premium services.

Want to know more?

Would you like to know more about Mendix and the value of a data portal for your organization? Are you considering using a portal to improve interaction with customers or suppliers? We would be happy to discuss the specific needs of your organization. Leave a message via the button below. We will get back to you shortly!