Case Study
Kitarino
System migration across 42 daycare centres: how a childcare provider replaces its childcare software without administration, parents or accounting noticing it in daily operations.
Case Study
System migration across 42 daycare centres: how a childcare provider replaces its childcare software without administration, parents or accounting noticing it in daily operations.
Kitarino operates 42 daycare centres in several German states. The existing childcare software is being replaced, and the new system KitaONE will carry administration, parent communication, contracts and billing for all locations. A migration of this size is not an IT project but a change of operations: master data from three systems, running contracts with parents, children's booked hours, employee working hours and the interface to accounting all have to be right on the cutover date. Kitarino handed the steering of the programme to us.
Before data flows, the target has to be in place. We set up the complete organisational structure in the test environment: four entities, eight cities, all 42 daycare centres and 154 educational groups, with the location identifiers for the later data mapping. Every entry was checked against the master data list. Whatever cannot be maintained in the system itself, such as addresses, facility numbers and approved place numbers, we prepared and clarified the maintenance path with the vendor.
On this structure we tested the parents' path from enquiry to contract: enquiry via the new website form against all 42 locations, a visit booked manually or self-booked via time slots, then contract creation. All findings, from unadjusted email templates to a bug on the booking page, went to the vendor in one consolidated list and are being worked through there.
The exports from the legacy system were not sufficient for a clean transfer. Above all, the exact booked hours of the children, the prices in the contract data and the daily working hours of employees were missing. So we created a field mapping: where the data lives today (legacy system, Personio, DATEV), where it lands in KitaONE, where the delta is. We also decided that the production environment will be set up fresh and the transfer will run through a purpose-developed migration job, not by copying the test environment. Group types and capacities are collected cleanly per region.
In parallel we are preparing the connection to accounting: number ranges clarified, account assignment standardised via cost centres, protection against duplicate transfers firmly planned, dunning concept with all edge cases documented together with the accounting team. The pricing logic for billing was specified in a dedicated workshop and is with the vendor for implementation.
Weekly jour fixe with the software vendor, a shared work list as status board, effort estimate per topic block, weekly review to management. This way everyone can see where the migration stands and who has the next step.
New employment contracts and onboarding documents are read via OCR and the relevant fields are created in Personio. Deliberately staged: first an observation phase in which the system only reads along and is compared weekly against the data maintained by HR. Only fields with a reliable hit rate are switched live.
Around 70 daycare centre managers are effectively the HR contacts on site, without HR training. An internal knowledge base with chatbot answers questions on termination, pregnancy or expiring police clearance certificates, with regional differences per federal state and escalation to the HR team.
For every order, the invoice is read, assigned to the region based on the delivery address and forwarded to the responsible regional accounting mailbox. Unclear cases land flagged in a central mailbox.
A daily run collects new reviews from all locations, drafts a reply for each review and sends it to marketing via Outlook with approve/reject buttons. Replies are published only after a click, never automatically, and never with any reference to whether a child attends the centre.
KitaONE, Personio API, DATEV interface, purpose-developed migration job, ClickUp as status board. For the accompanying automations n8n, Supabase, OpenAI and Anthropic models, Postgres, Microsoft Outlook.
We take over the steering before the cutover date does.