The International Cricket Council (ICC) is installing an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to handle a 10-fold increase in revenues in the past five years.
Cricket’s governing board plans and runs tournaments and events such as the Cricket World Cup, the Champion’s Trophy and the ICC awards.
Such events have fuelled huge growth in the organisation’s annual revenues, which are expected to reach more than $200m (£101m) next year.
Handling such large amounts of money is becoming increasingly difficult with the current system, says ICC chief financial officer Faisal Hasnain.
‘Everything we do is like a little project carried out with its own small budget,’ he said.
‘All those individual projects have to be monitored to ensure that the money we have is being spent properly.
‘At the moment we are doing this using a lot of spreadsheets and they just cannot cope with the sheer volume of the money and the projects that are coming in from it.’
The Epicor-supplied system will allow the ICC to plan events and tournaments up to five years in advance, says Hasnain.
‘We have expense sheets running in a continuous rolling process a long time before the events happen, so at any one point I can track expense budgets for events up to 2012,’ he said.
It is possible for very large organisations to operate using spreadsheet systems, but ERP systems improve efficiency, says Ovum analyst Gary Barnett.
‘Many sporting governing bodies have taken on ERP systems as they have grown into large organisations,’ he said.
‘The ICC has obviously reached that point in its growth where it needed to look to make these changes as well.’
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