The Children's Society aims to drive efficiency with e-documents and mobile working

Technology-driven efficiency drive at 134-year-old children's charity

The Children's Society, a charity supporting disadvantaged and vulnerable young people, has deployed software by Advanced Business Solutions, which the organisation suggests will enable it to provide better frontline services.

Established in 1882, The Children's Society is now comprised of 1,000 staff and 11,000 volunteers and it's hoped that the deployment of Advanced's business technology suite - including a mobile expenses application - will help streamline processes and provide increased efficiencies.

Other customers of Advanced include Irish airline Air Lingus, which deployed Advanced Air Approvals to increase efficiency in its procurement process.

Advanced packages that The Children's Society is deploying include the OpenAccounts finance system, the Collaborative Planning budgeting and planning tool, along with electronic and workflow-management processes.

In particular, OpenAccounts is expected to help The Children's Society by enabling the finance team to store more information about transactions and to make better informed decisions.

"We want to ensure that our resources are focused on children and young people and this means being as efficient as we can be in managing support services such as Finance," said Russell Craigie, finance project manager at The Children's Society.

"We also want to ensure that we have efficient business processes and that our managers have access to good financial information so that they can manage money carefully," he added.

Ultimately, the organisation believes the deployment of the software will directly benefit the vulnerable children it's tasked with supporting.

"Using a single supplier like Advanced for all our solutions and hosting was a key decision. We don't want our time to be focused on integrating systems from a variety of suppliers - our priority is directly supporting children and campaigning on their behalf," Craigie said.

Deployment of the document management tools will enable charity staff to process thousands of invoices every year, something which is currently only done using paper.

It's hoped that providing staff with the tools to submit such requests on mobile devices will enable them to spend more time helping children, as well as cutting costs. "Social workers need to be in the field to be effective and travelling to the office solely for administration, such as expenses, is inefficient and time-consuming," said Craigie.

"By empowering staff to complete these tasks from wherever they are we are enabling them to spend more time supporting children, young people and their families," he continued.

"Advanced's solutions will give us greater insight and control of finances, to ensure we are working as efficiently as possible and allowing more resources to be allocated to frontline services," Craigie concluded.

The Children's Society isn't the only charity that is looking towards technology to change the way it provides services; The Prince's Trust is in the midst of a "digital transformation" based on Oracle Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software.