Situation
Our Client, an international Non-Profit Organisation dedicated to helping fund the prevention and treatment of HIV, TB and malaria, had just undergone a re-organization to strengthen grant management, improve efficiency and tighten financial supervision, when they approached OWT with the task of reshaping their IT department and providing interim cover for the CIO position. Their Vision is to free the planet from the burden of those diseases. Their declared Mission is to save lives by (re-)investing the world's money in the right places. This innovative approach relies on a “country ownership” and performance-based funding model, meaning that local agents implement their own programs on a country basis. Their funding activities are in line with their local priorities, and will receive our Client's financing where quantifiable results have been achieved. Since their establishment in 2002, our Client has supported more than 1,000 programs in 151 countries, providing AIDS treatment to 4.2 million people, anti-tuberculosis treatment to 9.7 million people and 310 million insecticide-treated nets for the prevention of malaria.
Approach
The majority of interactions with country entities relying on the “manual” send of emails with attachments, there was a huge deal of inefficiencies and a great lack of transparency. In view of these issues we quickly identified the need for implementation of new IT systems to
- Support the general “Grant Management” processes,
- Simplify communication between stakeholders (internal and external), and
- Improve synergies across countries.
Working closely with our Client over a period of two years we developed a compelling solution which would not only resolve the above problems and inefficiencies, but also make significant cost savings. Having understood the huge potential and value of connecting users all over the world, we were able to encourage users, partners and top managers to leverage the emergence of Cloud services, such as PaaS (Platform as a Service) and SaaS (Software as a Service).
These new technologies are providing new opportunities to better fulfill the mission and goals of the IT department, including:
- The ability to safely share complex business processes with third parties (without providing full access to the Fund's ERP)
- Better control of costs and increased flexibility
- The Reduction of general business risk
In our case we opted for a solution using Salesforce.com which we identified as the optimal platform, and the transition to which we oversaw from initial conceptualization through to final implementation.
Using cloud-based services enabled us to realize dramatic improvements, both in the way business processes are organized and information is shared: Upon the project's completion our Client had managed to consolidate a total of 135 independent sub-processes into 1 coherent global unit. Vital information is no longer fragmented and key stakeholders have access to all information required to make informed and effective decisions.
