UN agency spends £34m on ERP system

United Nations Development Programme streamlines systems to ease fund distribution

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has spent $59m (£34m) on an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system for its offices in 145 countries.

The organisation, which is the UN’s global development network that provides resources to help people improve their lives, is replacing 21 separate applications with an Oracle PeopleSoft system.

Jens Wandel, director of the centre for business solutions at the UNDP, says the organisation needed the ERP system to make the distribution of funds much more efficient.

‘Our global turnover is $4bn (£2.3bn), and the system we had for distributing that money was a mess,’ he said.

‘The previous systems were all built to replicate past paper processes. Those paper processes date from a long time ago, and are not the way we should be operating in the 21st century. Plus, none of these systems spoke to each other, so we had enormous difficulties in moving information around the organisation.’

The old system was slowing down the way that aid was distributed to different countries, forcing UN personnel to operate with large margins.

Different countries would often think they did not have money when in fact they did, because information on what was where was so fragmented, says Wandel.

‘When we were receiving contributions, it could sometimes be several months before people were told that there was money available,’ he said.

‘The result was that we could not make the progress we wanted to make with issues on the ground in the countries in which we operate.

‘Lives could be affected by whether people knew what money was where.’

The ERP system is also helping the UNDP to reform its business practices and the way that the organisation deals with its finances.

Critically for the UNDP, the new system is entirely web-based.

‘We are probably one of the most decentralised development organisations in the world, so having a web-based system allows us to operate to the same standards and processes worldwide,’ said Wandel.