The Organisation:

MacKillop Family Services is a not-for-profit organisation that can date its foundation back 150 years to when the Sisters of Mercy, Christian Brothers, and Sisters of St Joseph began their work in Australia, establishing homes for children who were orphaned, destitute or neglected, and for families in need of care and support.

In 2005 Professional Advantage (PA) began its long-standing relationship with MacKillop Family Services. The relationship was formed around the provisioning and support of Infor SunSystems, together with the addition of PA developed functionality to meet the requirements of Infor SunSystems clients worldwide.

The Need:

The MacKillop finance team had been successfully using the Infor SunSystems financial management system for over 20 years, consistently finding it reliable and meeting their accounting needs. However, it was a legacy system and integration to other in-house systems was difficult, so the team decided to investigate the next phase for their financial systems.

In February 2021, MacKillop conducted an internal review to identify the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats to their Corporate Services team. The outcome of this process identified a list of key requirements that their new solution would need to address, as well as opportunities and features that a new solution would bring to the organisation. These key requirements, opportunities, and features included:

• Process automation and time savings.
• Realtime business intelligence and reporting.
• Greater control of financial data.
• A more integrated enterprise.
• Upgrading from a legacy application that was no longer keeping pace with current technology trends.
• Identifying and utilising a platform, as part of the Microsoft eco-system, that is fully managed in the cloud and implements bi-annual updates to keep the platform current without a major upgrade expense.
• Greater efficiencies with a more streamlined and better integrated system.

The Solution:

Their decision to engage PA as their partner was highly influenced by their long-standing relationship, as well as the prior working relationships they had with current members of the PA team. The project began in mid-2021 and was facilitated by a PA team who had skillsets and experience in both SunSystems and Business Central.

Reporting was a key project focus, and so PA made the recommendation to use Solver. This corporate performance management solution boasts considerable ease of use, has a data warehouse based in Australia, and has pre-built data connectors to Business Central.

The Challenge:

A significant challenge that the project team at both MacKillop and PA faced was posed by MacKillop staff: “Why, after 20 years, do we need to change systems?”.

Nandika Mather, General Manager Finance and Business explained:

• “The move to Business Central has allowed MacKillop to restructure and add additional Cost Centres to the chart of accounts, something that they were unable to do with SunSystems after it had exhausted the ability to add.
• “Business Central gave the organisation the ability to be flexible when constructing their chart of accounts.
• “The organisation could move from paper approval processes to an automated and therefore auditable approval process that saved time and was error free.
• “Any change in bank details on a vendor card in Business Central is immediately trackable, in contrast to the previous system which required tracking through an email trail of approvals.”

The Results:

The planning of the transition to Business Central by PA’s project team was well co-ordinated and detailed.  PA and MacKillop agreed on a 12-month project plan that allowed staff in the finance team time to learn and adjust to the new system. Whilst transitions of this magnitude have their difficulties, looking back it can be said that the implementation went very well. It took around 6 months to socialise the change and ‘bed down’ the system within the finance team, however the team have stated the journey has well and truly been worth it.

The introduction of Solver to the platform has reduced their reporting time from up to 16 hours to less than one hour. Solver allows designated users to run their own reports, rather than one person handling the running and sending of reports to the requester.

 “I love the ease of using Solver and the ability to run my own reports quickly and in real time.”

Graham Boal, Group Director – Corporate Services, MacKillop Family Service

MacKillop also chose to implement ProSpend—an add-on integrated into Business Central—with PA to manage their expenses.

The challenge of bringing a new system into a large team that were comfortable using the same system for the past two decades has been identifiably worthwhile.

Both Graham Boal and Nadika Mather have highlighted the response from the finance team:

“Why did we not do this 5 years ago?”

The Future:

Already looking forward to the next development to their processes, the team have identified that they will be exploring the budgeting and forecasting capabilities of Solver.