How National Lottery switched from SharePoint to Optimy

The Belgian National Lottery, as we know it today, was established in 1934 with the mission of organizing public lotteries, betting, competitions, and games of chance in the public interest. It exclusively features games based on chance, allowing anyone to participate with a modest stake. Through the contributions from the multitude of players, the Lottery rewards winners and contributes to various social projects and charitable causes.

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Challenge

Dealing with a substantial annual charity budget of 345 million euros for Culture, Sports, Sciences, Poverty reduction, and Sustainable development related projects, the National Lottery faced hurdles with their previous SharePoint-based system. Lauranne Lenoir, with three years of experience at the Belgian National Lottery, embarked on transforming their grant management process, known internally as "The Optimy Project."

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Solution

The transition to the Optimy solution occurred in two stages. 

The Optimy team, in the first step, implemented their user-friendly front-end. The Lottery started using it to gather grants applications. However, they were still managing all related administrative tasks in their old Sharepoint backend, deeply intertwined with the National Lottery's federal structure and subject to extensive controls, which was quite challenging. 

Thus, as part of their continuous improvement process, Optimy, over nearly a year, meticulously developed their unique backend tool, to comply with State regulations, and migrated a database spanning almost 30 years, encompassing more than a hundred projects annually.

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Results

Optimy facilitated seamless external committee validations for grants, fostering transparency, while for projects evaluated internally, the platform's evaluation module proved instrumental. Since the beginning of 2023, after a year and a half of using Optimy, the National Lottery successfully managed over 4,000 projects through the platform. A significant increase in project volume was observed compared to the time they were using their previous SharePoint system.