Business intelligence in youth healthcare logistics
Wouter Roorda on his internship at INITI8, July 2010
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“During the spring of 2010, I had the opportunity to do my SBB-Internship at INITI8 in Rotterdam. INITI8 supports profit and non-profit organizations with the planning & control of their operations by means of simulation and business-intelligence.” An example of planning & control support is making scenario-analyses. In a workshop setting, several possible futures are simulated. The goal is threefold: to model and demarcate relevant business processes, to gain insight in relevant assumptions with regard to the input data, and to get a feeling of the bandwidth of fluctuations of outcomes.
An example of business intelligence is the product CTRL8, which gives health care providers and provinces, INITI8’s main customers, insight in the logistics and finances surrounding their daily operations, such as client logistics, personnel logistics and the depletion of financial resources.
In this niche market, INITI8 is market leader with a market share over 80%. Over the years, INITI8 has grown vastly both in number of clients as well as number of employees and is renowned for in-depth knowledge of the youth healthcare sector.
My internship was primarily focused on IT-related projects. Tasks differed on a weekly basis and covered almost the entire company. Four large projects were carried out during the internship.
During the first project several data streams from multiple data sources were combined and explored in order to yield useful information on the health care history of clients in different organizations.
In a second project, the internal data warehouse structure was revised, modified and audited based on experiences in projects and to accommodate for the ever changing dimensions of the dynamic youth healthcare sector.
The third project concerned the simulation of business processes for the Dutch board of child protection, modeling the processes, quantifying the model and participating in the workshop with the customer.
My final project was an acquisition project. Example data was visualized using advanced software, to help a mental healthcare institution with preparing its yearly expense accounts for insurance companies and gaining insight in patient dynamics and employee productivity.
Although this internship was not directly related to my chemistry master, it fits in the SBB program. I gained insights in project management and time management. Also, due to the fact that INITI8 is a relatively small company, one hears about decision making on the higher management level easily.
I found that just by working at INITI8 I gained insights into what kind of strategic decisions are best at certain moments, how products can be marketed effectively and even insights in how large internal and external problems can be handled within a business environment. These are all subjects addressed in SBB fundamentals.
I would recommend anyone with a feel for IT to do an internship at INITI8. For me it was certainly a good choice. The work is diverse and challenging and the atmosphere at the work place is exceptionally good. I feel that the pure IT projects are sometimes too challenging, but interesting nonetheless. Developing IT-skills in this field is therefore one of my goals for the near future.
Overall, I have thoroughly enjoyed this internship. In the first place because the work was fun to do and the work was challenging. Secondly, I learned how to function within a small business environment and discovered several strengths and weaknesses in my own work. Thirdly, I learned new skills that can be helpful in de future.
After this internship I will continue working for INITI8, hopefully resulting in a definitive contract upon finishing my Science Based Business programme.”
Find more information on SBB internships and more SBB internship experiences on our website.
