Labor Union

Arbo Unie is a full-service certified health and safety service provider with a focus on prevention, a multidisciplinary approach and demonstrable results. The organization is active in every industry in the Netherlands: from healthcare to government, from construction to the chemical industry. In addition to the name Arbo Unie, the service provider also operates under the labels mkbasics.nl, Kr8werk, Verbanen, BeLife and Port Health Centre Rotterdam. In total, more than 900 people work there. Arbo Unie has 35 locations with headquarters in Nieuwegein. The IT and data of all labels and branches is centralized.

Future-proof and scalable

Anna Geraedts is Chief Data Officer at Arbo Unie: "Inergy has built a future-proof, scalable data platform for us. This allows us to create more value with our data. Arbo Unie already had a data warehouse solution but it was no longer adequate. The technology was not suitable for Arbo Unie's ambitions to process large amounts of data from various applications with good performance.

So we started looking for a new solution that would allow us to work more efficiently and more scalably. Our service manager had asked around in his network for a good IT partner. In doing so, Inergy's name came up remarkably often and prominently."

Inergy has best overall solution

"Inergy was therefore one of the three parties we requested quotes from," Anna continues. "Inergy turned out to have the best total solution: both technically and in terms of available manpower (resources). The latter was definitely a prerequisite, because as Arbo Unie we don't do our IT ourselves.

We want to make organizations more successful by promoting the vitality and health of working people. That's what we're good at. IT should help us do that, but we have no ambition to build applications and the like ourselves."

Collecting absence data

The core business of an occupational health and safety service is, of course, to help clients with their absence and prevention policies. Anna: "We know what is going on with our clients' employees, and how the absenteeism process is progressing. Is there physical complaints or psychological complaints, for example. Or both? What are the examinations like? What is happening in terms of prevention? Where are improvements possible?

We prepare reports that our labor consultants use to go to the client. This gives them insight into what is going on in terms of absenteeism in their organization. But we want much more. In the future, we're going to set up a really big use case that allows you to manage your organization."

Feeling good about yourself at Arbo Union

"Our motto is Feeling Good about Yourself. Our own managers steer their people to work from that motto. To know how your people are doing, you need insights on which you can steer. These insights are derived from the conversations you have with your employees, but they also come from data.

Think of data on absenteeism, employee satisfaction, but also how they perform their work. With these kinds of insights from data, we help our executives keep our employees Lekker in their skin."

Data quality and knowledge is essential

"To properly drive your organization with data, you will of course have to model your data correctly and the quality of your data must be good. For that you need a lot and in-depth knowledge of the data domain. Among other things, to know whether you need new data, and if so, which ones? Of course, that's not just IT's domain. You need the rest of your organization to do that."

The data team facilitates researchers

With more than 12,000 clients who collectively have more than 1.2 million workers, Arbo Unie has a lot of information at its disposal. This further fuels the ambitions of one of our country's largest health and safety service providers. "Our stakeholders encourage us to expand the knowledge domain of labor and health through scientific research," Anna explains. "We therefore work closely with several universities from our Academic Workplaces.

For example, our Chief Health Officer, Willem van Rhenen, is a Professor of Engagement and Productivity at Nyenrode Business University.

Prof. Dr. Corné Roelen, occupational physician at Arbo Unie, is a professor of occupational medicine at the University of Groningen. Several Arbo Unie professionals, including company doctors, nurses and ergonomists, are also engaged in scientific research.

By conducting such research and publishing about it in scientific journals, we contribute to the knowledge domain of labor and health. From our data team we facilitate the researchers with datasets with which they can conduct their research, of course with anonymized data.''

Snowflake and Azure

"For all these things, our old data warehouse was not suitable," Anna continues. "Inergy recommended a cloud solution to us; a direction we were thinking about ourselves. Since we already had a lot of Microsoft in-house, we chose Microsoft's cloud: Azure.

On top of that, Inergy implemented Snowflake as its data platform. One of the pluses of this platform is its ability to share data without transporting it.

Another advantage is that you can easily assign rights to users. For example, medical personal data can only be accessed by doctors, as required by the AVG.

For data visualization (dashboarding), we use Microsoft Power BI. With this we make the business intelligence available to end users. Prior to this choice and implementation, Inergy took a very close look at how this all fits into our larger data program. Together we looked at both the technology and our organization."

Nice result and long-term benefit

The process is now nearing completion. "We have achieved the very best result that will also benefit us for the longer term," Anna concludes. "It's the beginning of a party because we want to unlock even more data sources and combine even more data.

It is great to see that we can already make many colleagues and customers happy with valuable insights from data. The investments of this process are thus paying for themselves very quickly. And so we continue to build in order to gain even more valuable insights that can help our professionals and clients."

Good 'professionals' at Inergy

Looking back on the cooperation, Anna is very satisfied: "From Inergy we deal with good 'professionals'. The mutual cooperation is excellent. They work through a well-defined project structure but are very flexible. They think along with us about our data architecture and data management.

We get a lot of value for our money. On a human level, things are also very pleasant. Our team enjoys working with Inergy people. They catch on, have an enormous drive and are pleasant to deal with. They are happy with us as a client and we with them as an IT partner!"