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Tuulia Sinijarvi
Microsoft, Business Apps
The less time spent on administrative processes, the sooner relief aid can reach refugee camps around the world. This is the simple goal of implementing Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations in the Danish Refugee Council.
How do you improve collaboration in a global organisation with 7,000 employees, more than 150 offices and thousands of volunteers and projects all over the world?
This was the question that the Danish Refugee Council (DRC) asked themselves. They had previously handled HR, finance, grants and logistics in multiple IT solutions, offering several challenges. The grants management system was a piece of proprietary software that made workflows heavy and time consuming. Employees had to manually handle all supply chain steps in the logistics solution. The HR solution was not able to give the organisation a global overview of all employees, and the finance system needed a replacement and an upgrade.
The Danish Refugee Council chose to implement Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations. With a single coherent platform, the Danish Refugee Council can now work as “One DRC” across national borders. Within HR, it means that they get a global solution that requires fewer printed forms, giving managers better overview and yielding more time for staff skills development. Within finance, the Danish Refugee Council is enjoying an agile cloud-based solution, where data is always available in real-time – regardless of the employee’s location and role in the organisation. The finance solution also integrates with HR, logistics and grants. This means that the Danish Refugee Council can align its processes and enjoy better insights into the overall operation. Within grants, the Danish Refugee Council will have a standardised and simpler handling, supporting the varying requirements for documentation and reporting. And within logistics, the Danish Refugee Council is provided with a system-supported supply chain including full transparency in the procurement process securing a faster execution from funding to the distribution of aid.
What is true in every other organisation also applies to the Danish Refugee Council: The more workflows that can be digitised, the more workflows can be automated. This offers several benefits: