DELA

DELA, the cooperative founded in 1937 under the name Draagt Elkanders Lasten, is the market leader in the Dutch funeral industry with 5.5 million members. It is a multifaceted organization. DELA is an insurer with its own asset management branch, operates dozens of crematoria and funeral homes, and works with thousands of suppliers such as florists, printers and catering establishments. The face to customers, members and their next of kin, are the hundreds of funeral directors.

So says Nick van Dulken, product owner of team Maatwerk Uitvaartverzorging (Custom Funeral Care). He is responsible at DELA for all systems within the Funeral Care sector that support the process and new projects, from notification of death to funeral and invoicing.

The applications used for this until a few years ago were so outdated that proper support was hardly possible. One example is LARA, which ran on the laptops of funeral directors. For them, it is a crucial application with which they organize funerals during conversations with next of kin. "Such a local solution is impractical, for example if a funeral director falls ill or if his laptop is stolen, so a more centralized solution had long been under consideration," says Betabitter Roger. On top of that, a good number of users would be added after DELA acquired Yarden in August 2021. " The application would no longer be able to handle that in terms of performance," adds Betabitter Sam. "Moreover, DELA felt they couldn't present such an outdated application to their new colleagues. We therefore wanted to create something nice for them, a new application with the same functionality, but not with the appearance of Windows 98 and inexplicable bugs."

At the time, Roger and Sam were primarily responsible for managing the old applications. Elsewhere DELA was running a program to develop a whole new application landscape for funeral services.

But that's not the whole story. Because why do two external consultants decide to start building a new application? "Indeed, we used the term BlackOps a lot at the time," Roger laughs. "Look: we were the software management team, we had all the knowledge, we were convinced that we knew which way to go. Our approach is that we then just start building it. And if we can show that it works then we will automatically get everyone on board. I think that's really very positive about DELA: if you come up with a good idea, you get the space to put your energy into it."

A team of seven Betabit colleagues is now working on developing and managing the new landscape. More than three quarters of them have now migrated to the cloud. "The majority of users are very satisfied with the new system," says Nick.

The new landscape has also created a modern, stable IT environment that supports DELA's commercial strategy and enables new initiatives. "We want to offer members and next of kin more opportunities to shape and organize a funeral themselves in our online environment," says Nick. "This is in keeping with the current times and it can help to unburden them further. They have constant visibility of the progress, can see what actions they still need to take themselves and can do it at a time that is convenient for them." The experiences with the rebuild of LARA are also applied here. New initiatives are first developed as minimum viable products, after which a number of ambassadors among the funeral directors test them in practice. If customers find it a valuable addition, a decision on whether to roll out nationwide will be made after a quarter. So Betabit can move forward within DELA for a while it seems. "I certainly hope so!" says Nick.