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Compassion International Achieves Process Automation with Ultimus
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In Conjunction with the Ultimus Professional Services Team, Compassion International Automates Processes Designed to Provide Structure for its Sponsors |
CARY, N.C. — October 11, 2005 — Ultimus, the leading provider of Business Process Management (BPM) and Workflow Automation software and services that enable the shortest time to value today announced that Compassion International has finished deploying its first set of processes using the Ultimus BPM Suite. With the assistance of Ultimus’ Professional Services, Compassion has begun automating processes which will help them reach their goal of sponsoring one million children worldwide. Founded in 1952, Compassion International exists as an advocate for children, releasing them from spiritual, economic, social and physical poverty and enabling them to become responsible, fulfilled Christian adults. The organization has been growing at double digit rates for the last 5 years and currently, Compassion helps more than 691,188 children in more than 20 countries.
Given its dramatic growth, the organization needed to streamline its processes for child sponsorship. Many of the transactions completed on Compassion’s internet site originally required a high level of staff intervention. The manual processes included printing a summary of each transaction and then entering the same data into an internal database. This manual process required dozens of full-time employees entering data that was already in electronic format. These processes were slow, costly, and labor-intensive. The data re-entry was open to a significant margin of error, which can be costly for a large charitable organization.
Compassion selected Ultimus in order to eliminate duplicated efforts and to sustain its business growth through the use of efficient automated processes that continuously enhance the existing capacity without increasing operation size. The project dubbed “Web to COMPASS” (W2C), has changed how Compassion attracts, engages and services sponsors over the internet. It aids in increasing the speed of getting data into COMPASS; provides faster response in getting child packets to sponsors; makes bank transactions faster; and gets resources into the hands of sponsors and volunteers in a more timely manner.
“We are very excited about W2C because the benefits we are seeing will improve the corporate productivity of Compassion,” said Robert Miller, Corporate Planning Project Manager, Compassion International. “A high level ROI analysis was done to evaluate current support costs versus future costs after project completion. According to our projections, with Ultimus, the measure of total cost per sponsorship is expected to be reduced significantly for processes that are affected by Web interaction. Additionally, we estimate a time savings allowing 2.5 full time employees to take on other responsibilities not related to the Web.”
In addition to the above benefits, W2C is addressing some of the long range infrastructure issues that provide building blocks for future projects; allowing Compassion to continue to meet the needs of children in poverty.
The team for this project included a combination of the expertise of Ultimus’ BPM developers and the .NET development skills of Compassion International’s developers. The Service Oriented Architecture base developed by Compassion and the workflow capacity of Ultimus melds to form a responsive automation system. This new system is designed to meet the business needs of a rapidly growing organization.
Compassion International has taken a phased approach to the roll out of its processes. With the help of Ultimus’ Professional Services team, the first set of processes—Profile Updates—has already been placed into production. Processes to follow include Christmas gifts, payments, direct payment, gifts, orders placed, monetary commitments, non money commitments and departures.
“By rolling out processes in a phased approach, it gives the project the ability to build on its initial successes by adapting efficiencies developed over time,” said Steve Sparano, Global Director of Professional Services. “A training plan is also part of this project to ensure that once the processes are delivered, they are widely adopted throughout Compassion. It is very reassuring to see such a vital community organization benefiting from the implementation of technology, and we are glad to be part of their success.”
About Compassion International
Compassion International is one of the nation's largest Christian child development organizations, working with church partners in Africa, Asia, Central and South America and the Caribbean. Since 1952, Compassion has touched the lives of more than a million children. For information Compassion visit its web site at http://www.compassion.com.
About Ultimus
Ultimus is a global business process management (BPM) software company that delivers the shortest time to value for business process automation and improvement initiatives. Ultimus has business operations and sales offices throughout Europe, North America, Asia, Middle East and South America. Through these offices and a network of more than 100 partners in 61 countries, more than 1,500 customers, including First Plus Financial, STASYS, Unilever, Citizens Bank, McKesson HBOC, Microsoft, Newell Rubbermaid, Sony and Siemens, have deployed the Ultimus BPM Suite to address their business process management challenges. Ultimus and its partners use the Ultimus Business Process Development Methodology to standardise implementations, accelerate deployments and enable continuous improvement.
The Ultimus BPM Suite has been recognized by eWeek magazine with the 2004 eWeek Excellence Award. In addition, Ultimus is a four-time recipient of the Technology Fast 500 Award from Deloitte & Touche and has twice earned a spot in the Inc.500. Additional information about Ultimus can be obtained by visiting the Ultimus Web site at http://www.ultimus.com, emailing info@ultimus.com or by calling 919-678-0900.
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