Providing independent business systems advice to charities
Careers Research and Advisory Centre
www.crac.org.uk
Background
An educational
charity deriving most of its income from corporate membership
subscriptions and donations, licensing income, project sponsorship and
course participant fees. The main services provided being the development
and delivery of career programmes to individuals and influencing and
helping organisations such as schools, colleges and universities. These
programmes include the delivery of conferences, courses and seminars and
the publication of material for use by students, parents and teachers.
Entirely bespoke systems were being used to manage and operate the
charity.
IT systems strategy and systems definition & selection. Implementation monitoring.
Scale
1 location, 35+ employees, £2m+ turnover.
Scope of requirements
Database of individuals and companies, course & conference booking, course management & development, subscription processing, accounting and office productivity.
Bespoke legacy systems -
the existing bespoke applications were over 10 years old and as well as
functional deficiencies, program problems were occurring on a regular
basis requiring a significant amount of effort to fix.
Dissatisfaction with external support
- support for the bespoke applications was provided by an external
individual working as a sole trader and the charity were becoming
increasingly dissatisfied with the level of service being provided. Non-integrated systems - the
bespoke operational system was not integrated with the financial systems. Centralised database - a centralised database of individuals and companies that was common to all
applications and accessible by all users and could be integrated with
packaged accounting software was required. Old hardware - the existing
hardware infrastructure was old with many PC's being underpowered and
unable to support the latest Microsoft office products.
The systems strategy outlined the target systems structure which was based around packaged application software to cover all applications, running on a new network. The requirements for the packaged software were documented and an invitation to tender issued to potential suppliers of appropriate solutions. After detailed demonstrations of the short-listed solutions, the preferred packaged based system was chosen. The solution, running under Windows NT, included a CRM system including course and conference booking which integrates with Sun Account and Microsoft Office. Microguide provided a watching brief over the implementation.
Microguide Corporate Computer Consultants, 82 Shortlands Road, Kingston-upon-Thames, KT2 6HE
Tel: 020 8549 7152
Fax: 020 8549 8112
Email:enquiry@microguide.co.uk
ã2008 Microguide. All rights reserved.
