Zadkine education; integration technology supports urban motto.

The city of Rotterdam, where the verb “to clean or to polish” appears in their urban motto, is obviously very proud of their hard working citizens. A large part of these hard workers are trained at Zadkine. More than 1700 employees train not only young students but also adults to become professionals who matter. This is only possible if you have a vision and a lot of unbridled commitment.

Zadkine’s educational vision focuses on three things:

• Personal growth (Asking for the unknown road)
• Innovation (Off the beaten track)
• Flexible and tailor-made (Mapping out a personal career path)

Canonical Data Model at Zadkine education

Of course, strong ICT support is indispensable to fulfil this vision. That is why a lot of work has been done on a clear ICT strategy. From three personas (the student, the teacher and an educational support staff), we looked at how they can be helped to follow the right digitization path, and Data-driven Working is an important part of this. With the many applications in use in the education landscape, exchanging data between different applications is often cumbersome, time-consuming, expensive and unreliable. For this reason, Zadkine has chosen to implement a Canonical Data Model (CDM) together with the specialists of Enable U. One common data model with standard data definitions that connects all applications and serves as the only integration model for the organization.

Data-driven working at Zadkine

Zadkine education therefore decided in 2021 to work with the integration specialists at Enable U on an integration architecture that should ensure that applications can exchange data more easily. This not only brings data-driven working a lot closer, but also makes it possible to build new ICT initiatives faster and more securely if data from different applications can be exchanged in a simple way. The Boomi integration platform and the expertise of the Enable U specialists were chosen.

Aladin Mhamdi, IT Architect at Zadkine: “Of course, at Zadkine we know exactly how to improve our administrative processes. In addition, we also have a clear vision of Lifelong Development and the growing need for more flexibility in education. The step to start working with Enable U helps us to realize our vision even better.“

Eliminate labour intensive work

After the first link between Eduarte (Student Information System) and Canvas (Learning Management System) for the exchange of information from students and teachers, the second integration was soon started under the guidance of Marc de Vries, implementation consultant at Enable U. To eliminate a lot of manual work, an integration between Eduarte and AFAS (Debtor Management) was chosen for the exchange of debtor and financial information. Two applications that don’t speak each other’s language and where mandatory fields for one could not be retrieved from the other. A typical example of a complex integration that has been successfully active in the production environment for months.

There are already many ideas about new integrations and with the more than 52 education-specific integrations that Enable U has built in recent years, Zadkine can assure itself of a lot of specialist knowledge at Enable U. In the meantime, Marc’s knowledge has been transferred step by step and Zadkine’s employees will develop more and more integrations themselves.

Jascha Gregorowitch, CTO at Enable U; “The integrations and connecting applications within the educational domain is currently taking off enormously. We clearly see that educational institutions are increasingly developing a strategy to better shape their complex IT environment and thus prepare it for the future. It is nice to see that they are increasingly using the MORA (Secondary Vocational Education Reference Architecture). This fits in perfectly with our philosophy and is in line with the experience we have gained within the government with Common Ground.“