GIP-MDS Gets a Unified Data Platform for a Big Data World

Digitizing social reports requires unified data management.

No one understands this better than the Groupement d'Intérêt Public Modernisation des Déclarations Sociales (GIP-MDS), a collaboration between public and private sectors created to digitize social reports. Founded in 2000, the GIP-MDS has a simple mission: to facilitate the collection of social data. GIP-MDS began with a unification project that created a single portal for all French companies, followed by a massive digital transformation project: the Déclaration Sociale Nominative (DSN). Today, the DSN digitizes reporting formalities by replacing 47 processes with a single digital document, helping private — and soon, public — organizations across France.

Addressing a Need

With more than 2 million DSN reports submitted each month for more than 20 million employees, GIP-MDS had a major challenge: monitoring and delivering huge amounts of data throughout the DSN Information system, which was distributed across the Information systems of various social organizations — from pension to healthcare to HR. Without operational visibility into this distributed infrastructure, the Group was reactive when responding to anomalies on a report, forcing the team to painstakingly investigate each partner’s disparate system to find the cause of the incident. To support end users and improve operations, GIP-MDS needed to federate stakeholders and find a unified solution to derive value from these large volumes of data.

Successfully Improving a Public Service

The GIP-MDS needed Splunk to ingest and process its large volumes of unstructured data, regardless of which format each public agency used. Since lost or delayed reports waste time and money, the secure, compliant and timely reporting made possible through Splunk has helped reporters and operators increase efficiency, protect employees' rights and free time for other priorities.

Today, all private companies use the DSN in France. The “hypervision” project proved that it was possible to successfully ensure better monitoring of data flows and anticipate incidents. Tax authorities have chosen to rely on the DSN for its income tax processes and taxes are now automatically deducted from paychecks, which means increasing volumes of data to be distributed to this new partner.

Expanding Access to Data to Improve Public Service

Splunk dashboards make data accessible to many users throughout the GIP-MDS and beyond — from the organization’s production team to operators from the private sector (such as mutual insurance companies) and public organizations (such as CNAV). Youssef Kilany, head of the architecture, expertise and performance department, says, "Splunk simplifies the use of data. Everyone accesses the relevant dashboard to answer their questions, using those key data insights to guide their actions."

By making data more available, these users can now track business KPIs in real time. Predictive analytics help the GIP-MDS team avoid incidents long before they impact the reporter, and when an issue does arise in the reporting process, Splunk’s advanced monitoring allows the team to quickly detect and fix the incident for a safer, more reliable experience for users. These improvements have translated to more satisfied companies and a public service that delivers on its promises.

Using Data for Decisions Across the Whole Business

Thanks to the speed of investigation and operational visibility offered by the Splunk platform, operators have freed time to focus on high-value projects. “Not only has the Splunk platform allowed us to save time by not having to perform numerous manual tasks on multiple systems, it’s also increased transparency," Kilany says. "With a diverse and sometimes non-technical background, all team members rely on Splunk to more easily access and use data.”

"Splunk has become the standard for all operators monitoring data flows,” says Kilany. Data insights from the Splunk platform are then reused for separate programs, helping ensure success for various public missions. In the future, reliable social data collection will help expand use cases, helping leaders use data to make decisions ranging from gender equality in the workplace to employment contracts.