A custom app on top of AFAS, live in two weeks, with sensitive healthcare data that never leaves Europe

De Forensisch Zorgspecialisten (DFZS) provides diagnostics, treatment, and reintegration in forensic mental health care, across clinics with around 1,300 colleagues. AFAS runs their core processes. But one process did not fit AFAS alone, so they built a custom application on top of it with nodge and went live in two weeks.

The problem: hour tracking in Excel, next to AFAS

From January 1, 2026, patient hours had to flow through AFAS to be paid out. The volume of bookings and the company-specific rules around leave accrual made entering them line by line in AFAS impractical, so the first solution was an AFAS analysis exported to Excel. Work supervisors tracked patient hours in those spreadsheets and sent them to administration once every four weeks for payment.

It did not hold up. Patient changes happened in AFAS during those four weeks, which meant extra spreadsheets had to be started mid-cycle. The whole path, from filling in the Excel files to building the imports, was error-prone. Administration lost an entire Monday every cycle just processing the incoming spreadsheets.

What they built

The application gives work supervisors a friendly way to book hours, accrue balances, and manage master data in one place, with the organization's specific calculation rules built in. Because the rules live in the software, certain mistakes simply cannot be made anymore, the kind that were easy to make in Excel.

The application we built gives us a user-friendly way to book hours, build up balances, and manage master data in one place, taking our company-specific calculation rules into account.

Melvyn Fiawo, AFAS ERP application manager at De Forensisch Zorgspecialisten

Why a custom app on top of AFAS, not inside it

AFAS is the system of record. It should stay that way. What DFZS needed was a purpose-built interface and a rules engine around a narrow, high-volume task, something an ERP is not meant to be reshaped into. Nodge is built for exactly this: custom software that sits on top of the systems you already run, talks to them, and keeps them as the source of truth.

On nodge that app is a first-class project with its own environments, its own Git history, and its own deploy pipeline. The platform's Action Gateway turns any endpoint into a callable, governed action through a single YAML manifest, so wiring the app to AFAS and to the payment process is declarative and versioned rather than a pile of brittle exports. Push to main, and the app is live with HTTPS in seconds.

Why sovereignty matters here, not as a slogan

This is forensic mental-health data. It is among the most sensitive data a Dutch organization can hold, and where it lives and who can touch it is not a detail. That is the part of the nodge platform that does the quiet work behind this story.

Nodge runs on a fully European stack with no American cloud dependencies, under Dutch jurisdiction, and is ISO/IEC 27001 certified by an RvA-accredited body, audited annually. You can run in the nodge EU cloud, or install nodge as your own platform on your own servers, with an air-gapped option for the most regulated environments. Either way, the code, the pipelines, and the governance are yours, and there is no lock-in pulling the data somewhere it should not be.

Around that sit the platform parts a healthcare organization actually has to answer for in an audit: a three-ring audit log across platform, organization, and project; per-project permissions; single sign-on through your own identity provider so your offboarding and access policies apply unchanged; and full observability of what the app is doing. The application is custom, but the controls underneath it are the platform's, the same on every project.

How it was possible in two weeks

Speed here is not a shortcut around governance. It is the result of not having to assemble the governance yourself. The Git hosting, the CI/CD pipeline, the environments, the HTTPS, the audit logging, the permissions, and the EU-sovereign hosting are already there on day one. The team could spend its two weeks on the thing that was actually unique, the hour-booking logic and DFZS's calculation rules, instead of on plumbing.

The team behind nodge made the difference. After a few conversations, the professionalism, proven experience, and crystal-clear vision were obvious. You feel all three in the infrastructure they have built, which is why we could deliver robust software in no time that the organization is genuinely happy with.

Melvyn Fiawo, De Forensisch Zorgspecialisten

The result

Administration got its Monday back, that full day per cycle is now spent on other work. Error rates dropped sharply, because the mistakes that were easy to make in Excel are now impossible to make in the tool. And the daily frustration around logging hours is gone, replaced by a simple tool people are glad to use.

The reaction at go-live made the point better than any metric:

Literally applause. Two colleagues hugged each other. People came up to me saying "really well done", "finally we are moving forward again", and "at last, this is what it should have been". Nothing but praise.

Melvyn Fiawo, De Forensisch Zorgspecialisten

Who this works for

Melvyn recommends nodge to organizations that want to get the most out of AFAS while genuinely improving the day-to-day experience for their colleagues. We would add: any organization that needs custom software around the systems it already runs, and cannot compromise on where its data lives, which is most of healthcare, government, and regulated industry in Europe.

Nodge reminds me of the English word nudge, a little push in the right direction. If you want a nudge the right way, nodge is the partner for you.

Melvyn Fiawo, De Forensisch Zorgspecialisten

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