Ankkalampi – GDPR Compliant Day Care

 

Business

Ankkalampi - GDPR Compliant Day Care

 

By IWA
19.04.2018

Ankkalampi - Ankdammen - Duckies is a major chain of private kindergartens in Finland, providing quality day care via almost 20 branches in Finnish, Swedish and English. As a growing company, Ankkalampi's business is also increasing in complexity. To support its further growth and streamline its day-to-day operations, Ankkalampi decided to partner up with IWA in order to build a new sales and back-office management solution customised to their needs.

IWA has been working with Ankkalampi since 2012. As a long-term technology partner, IWA has unique knowledge and insight into Ankkalampi's business needs and was able to propose a solution which was a complete match with Ankkalampi's needs. During these six years IWA has acquired significant and intricate know-how in the day care business, which also helped when it came to finding the perfect solution for Ankkalampi.

​"We have been working together with IWA for almost six years now. Their deep understanding of our business needs and requirements was a major advantage when designing and implementing our new management system. Also, IWA's solid understanding of GDPR was very valuable and helped with guiding us in the right direction. Having to make conscious decisions about the importance of different customer data records really made us think about our whole business in a somewhat new way", comments Heidi Ruhala, CEO & Founder of Ankkalampi.

Previously Ankkalampi has handled much of its back-office management work manually. With ever-growing numbers of children enrolled in its day care centers and especially with taking new privacy regulations into account, running operations mostly with Excel sheets and emails would not be feasible anymore.

As EU's new General Data Protection Regulation law (GDPR for short) is going to be enforced in May of 2018, it was clear that the new system must meet all its requirements. This is even more crucial as personal data handled in the system mostly concerns minors.

In addition to being secure the new solution is also the backbone of Ankkalampi’s customer success funnel. Ankkalampi wanted the solution to streamline day-to-day operations at the day care centers but also to support its sales as well. It needed to provide a way for the right people to access the right information at the right time. The only feasible way was to make the solution browser-based to get rid of proprietary offline software like Excel. In the new system, all needed data is accessible via any computer or mobile phone when required.

There were very few technical details involved in making the new solution GDPR compliant even though the system handles the data of minors. The single most important technical feature was the role-based access rights management system which grants access to data in a granular way. A decision was also made to use a Finnish cloud infrastructure provider to house the system and its data as close to home as possible.

However, the most important part of becoming "GDPR compliant" was actually completed as early as during the design and planning process with IWA and Ankkalampi. All the important decisions about what data to collect and what to leave out were made with Ankkalampi during the project's specification and scoping. Only by having a thorough understanding of what data is collected, why it is collected and where it is stored, can you design and implement a system that meets the requirements of the GDPR regulation.

If your organisation needs help with GDPR don’t hesitate to call or drop us an email today – there’s still time until May to fix GDPR issues prior to them becoming problems.