KRIFA: From on-premise to agile cloud solution

Krifa's Microsoft CRM 2011 supported all processes in Krifa's organizational elements, Trade Union, and unemployment insurance fund: From the first contact with the member to an assessment of the desire to work and then throughout the working life – both in connection with unemployment, until the member is paid unemployment benefits and finally retires from the labour market. 

The central IT system for member management was 10 years old and needed an upgrade.  

"It was necessary. Something had to be done. CRM 2011 had run out of support. We had to make a choice. Upgrade/migration was the obvious solution, but to what? After a thorough analysis, we chose the Dynamics 365 cloud solution. This was decided partly to take a giant technological leap and partly to let Microsoft implement the updates coming in the future. In this way, our focus is fully channeled into how we can continue to improve our services to the members and create opportunities for further digitalization, where it both makes sense and adds value. This is, of course, with complete utilization of the full potential of Dynamics 365." 

- Jens H. Terkildsen, IT Manager at Krifa 

Krifa has chosen a cloud strategy where they migrate the membership solution and many of the surrounding services to Azure. 

The solution comprises comprehensive business logic and several integrations to and from other systems. Before the project, Krifa’s solutions were primarily run on-premises. One goal of the project was to move CRM to D365 and establish a new infrastructure based on Azure and a more cloud-based approach. 

Delegate's final solution, therefore runs on D365, and at the same time, Azure has been deployed in several locations: 

• Several Azure services handle business logic between the various applications. 

• Databases previously hosted locally have been moved to Azure. 
• Monitoring using Application Insights. 

With the help of Delegate, Krifa has achieved a much more agile approach to deployment. The new services and components in D365 and Azure are far more disconnected from each other, and the internal dependencies have been removed. 

Before, deployment was a large monolithic process where all components had to be deployed together. Now, individual deployments are made several times a day by the individual components. 

Due to previous experiences, Krifa wanted to be responsible for the delivery to ensure greater anchoring and ownership of the finished solution. In this way, the project is very much the result of a close and ongoing collaboration between Krifa and Delegate, where the absolute focus has been to get the best possible solution and also get a process where elements were not just delivered but where there was also a focus on ongoing training and development. 

The result is a solution that Krifa’s own people know and even have ownership of. This makes subsequent maintenance less costly. At the same time, Krifa is, to a great extent, able to further develop and benefit from the new technologies. 

“We have our IT developers, so we need to have/get in-depth knowledge of the systems we use to manage our almost 160,000 active members. With Delegate, it has been possible to enter into a binding collaboration and community where knowledge remains in Krifa. We benefit greatly from that now, where the upgrade has been completed, and everyday life is upon us. During the process, Delegate’s people have joined our team as colleagues, not vendors.” 

- Jens H. Terkildsen, IT Manager at Krifa

With a comprehensive focus on Microsoft as a platform, many new opportunities exist to make the most of. In addition to the Azure platform, Krifa looks at the many opportunities in the Microsoft Power Platform. One component has already been built to collect the dialogue with members, while other platform parts are used continuously. Thus, the upgrade project is complete, the journey toward Cloud is well underway, and many benefits have not yet been realized.