© 2015 SAP SE or an SAP affiliate company. All rights reserved.
SAP Business Transformation Study | Public Sector | Plan International
Plan International: Improving Life
for the Children of the World Through
Better Information
Plan International is an NGO dedicated to improving the lives of children in over 70 of
the world’s poorest countries. To better fulfill its charter and report on the efficacy of
its spending decisions to donors, Plan implemented software from SAP. Plan is now
serving children better than ever while delivering donor reports that are much more
accurate, timely, and complete.
SAP Business Transformation Study | Public Sector | Plan International
Executive overview
Organization
Plan International
Headquarters
Woking, United Kingdom
Industry
Public sector –
nongovernmental
organization (NGO)
Products and Services
Helping the world’s children
escape poverty and fulfill
their potential
Employees
9,500
Business Transformation
Objectives
•• Provide the information demanded by donors
•• Respond more quickly to emergencies and other developments
•• Improve communication throughout the worldwide force
30X
More-frequent updates
of grants award data
Resolution
•• Implemented a comprehensive suite of SAP® software
•• Consolidated data from multiple SAP and non-SAP sources
•• Performed analysis and generated better reports
10X
Faster response to
emergencies
Benefits
•• Better visibility and consistency of data globally
•• Greater staff efficiency and effectiveness
•• Improved timeliness, accuracy, and completeness of information –
for better decision making
30X
More-frequent data
reconciliation
Read more
Budget
€722 million (fiscal year 2014)
Web Site
http://plan-international.org
Partner
Atos Origin
www.atos.net
“Organizations like ours want data that is accurate and consistent
worldwide, and we want it fast. These are some of the virtues of SAP
software, and that’s why so many of us choose SAP.”
Nigel Chapman, CEO, Plan International
2 / 6
© 2015 SAP SE or an SAP affiliate company. All rights reserved.
SAP Business Transformation Study | Public Sector | Plan International
Executive overview
Company objectives
Resolution
Business transformation
Future plans
Managing philanthropy in the digital
age – it’s all about data
Plan International is an NGO dedicated to fighting
poverty and improving life for more than 1 million
children and 90,000 communities in over 70 African,
Asian, and Latin American countries. Focusing on
education, health, youth employment, protection,
disaster risk management, and agricultural and food
security, its mission is to help children achieve their full
potential, contribute to society, and escape poverty.
Founded in 1937, Plan relies on donations from
individuals, corporations, governments, and granting
organizations of many kinds for the funds it needs to
fulfill its charter. Before continuing with their generosity, these donors ask Plan to report on the impact of
their previous donations. In the past, providing
comprehensive reports was difficult because data
was strewn around the world in many local systems
that were incompatible with one another. Combining
this data manually was slow, especially with so many
currencies to contend with. Too often estimates were
used, impairing accuracy. To satisfy its donors’
demands and keep the funds flowing, Plan wanted to
use automation to deliver accurate reports on
organization-wide activities quickly. Plan also wanted
to respond more quickly to natural disasters and
other unforeseen changes, which required the
same improvements in information accuracy,
timeliness, and global consistency.
Compounding Plan’s data management challenges,
donors’ information demands were growing more
sophisticated, requiring detailed data analysis beyond
the reach of the software in place. In addition, many of
Plan’s 9,500 staffers had mobile devices they wanted
to use for submitting and obtaining data, but the
existing software could not communicate with them.
3 / 6
© 2015 SAP SE or an SAP affiliate company. All rights reserved.
SAP Business Transformation Study | Public Sector | Plan International
Executive overview
Company objectives
Resolution
Business transformation
Future plans
Using the global standard to meet
global challenges
Plan knew that meeting such daunting challenges
required the wholesale replacement of its local
systems with a single solution that automated the
management of data globally. This solution had to
provide all the functionality needed for its four
operational areas: HR, finance, grants management,
and programs. After a review of the enterprise
resource planning field, it was clear to Plan that
SAP software fit the needs best.
“SAP software is recognized as the global standard,”
says Ann Firth, Plan’s CFO. “It provides the level of
integration we need and covers all our requirements,
which avoids the need for any other systems and the
inevitable data reconciliation problems that would
result. We can see SAP software growing with us as
further needs develop. Furthermore, we found it to
be affordable.”
“The highly integrated way that SAP software deals
with all our operational areas and worldwide sites is
absolutely key,” echoes Mark Banbury, Plan’s global
CIO. “That’s what equips us to report most effectively
to our donors. These are large grants, sometimes
€20 million plus, so a lot of Plan’s future is riding
on strong reporting. We wouldn’t want to rely on
anything but the best.”
With expert assistance from Atos Origin, Plan rolled
out the SAP solution in stages starting with HR. In less
than 18 months, the group went live with a workforce
solution from SuccessFactors, an SAP company,
providing unprecedented visibility of HR data. The
team went on to address finance in a multistage
program that is now nearing completion. The SAP
Business Planning and Consolidation application is
playing a particularly important role, bringing together
data from diverse systems into a unified whole.
4 / 6
© 2015 SAP SE or an SAP affiliate company. All rights reserved.
SAP Business Transformation Study | Public Sector | Plan International
Executive overview
Company objectives
Resolution
Business transformation
Future plans
Converting a recruiting team into a
resourcing team
Plan now uses SuccessFactors® solutions in the
cloud for all HR aspects of its business: talent
management, recruitment, learning, compensation,
and succession planning. “SuccessFactors software
has helped us reduce the amount of administrative
work we do and focus on higher value activities,” says
Pam Innes, director of HR and organizational development for Plan. “We’ve been able to convert our
recruitment team into a resourcing team, which would
have been very difficult without SuccessFactors. It lets
us see at a glance who has completed their assignments and who has not. Most important, it has
allowed us to provide faster and more powerful
humanitarian response now that we have at our
fingertips a roster of our people and their skills. As a
result, emergency responses that used to consume
weeks now take days. After Typhoon Haiyan
slammed the Philippines in 2013, for example, we
had people on the ground within 48 to 72 hours.”
In finance, information is delivered in near-real time.
Reports that used to take a month or more because
of the effort involved in coalescing data are now
delivered daily, and they are more accurate because
they are based on facts, not estimates. These reports
delve deeper than ever into the effectiveness of
Plan’s spending decisions because of analysis that
the organization performs. SAP BusinessObjects™
business intelligence solutions and the SAP Business
Warehouse application are the key tools Plan uses in
conducting this analysis.
“SAP software is about providing a holistic view of what you do. Managing
programs across 70 countries is amazingly complicated, but it’s a lot
simpler when you use SAP software.”
Nigel Chapman, CEO, Plan International
5 / 6
© 2015 SAP SE or an SAP affiliate company. All rights reserved.
Plan International
Executive overview
Company objectives
Resolution
Business transformation
Future plans
Making even better
decisions through
predictive analysis
Plan will soon finalize the finance portion of the
implementation and turn its attention to future
improvements SAP software can deliver. One prominent direction is predictive analysis. With it, Plan will
build models to help anticipate the results of future
business decisions based on past experiences and
analysis of current trends. This will increase Plan’s
confidence in the decisions it makes while improving
the methodology it uses in delivering programs.
Plan expects benefits in many other areas as well
and has formed a five-year plan to determine how to
get the most of its SAP software. “As always, we are
endeavoring to use our grants more effectively and
demonstrate our accomplishments more clearly to
donors,” says Firth. “Our SAP software will help by
providing the information we need to pinpoint where
our problems are and equipping us to take action to
address them. The end result will be happier donors,
more funding for Plan, and many new benefits for
the children of the world.”
37334 (15/06) © 2015 SAP SE or an SAP affiliate company. All rights reserved.
6 / 6
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