Americares is a global non-profit focusing on the health and development of individuals affected by poverty, disaster, or crisis. It has selected Unit4 ERPx. ERPx is the next generation ERP that Unit4 announced in 2020. ERPx will provide Americares with an integrated solution consisting of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Human Capital Management (HCM) and Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A). This is probably the first of many such announcements as Unit4 looks to roll out its innovative solution across existing and new customers.
Americares is the first global non-profit to select the solution and it is a huge boost for Unit4. Each year it has operations in an average of 90 countries with transformative health programs and quality medical aid to the value of around $600 million. All told it has provided more than $19 billion in aid to 164 countries since its founding more than 40 years ago.
Americares is good news for Unit4
Claus Jepsen, CTO at Unit4 and the driving force behind the new product commented: “ERPx is designed to deliver exactly what organizations need to succeed. New to the market this year, Americares will be the first customer to benefit from our new approach to ERP, which combines our mid-market experience, with a focus on people, and an industry-leading cloud platform designed to be ‘right for your business’. Americares prides itself on efficiency, which is why it is trusted by donors and consistently receives high marks from charity evaluators. We’re proud to deliver the systems Americares and non-profits around the world need to deploy aid to those communities most in need.”
The news will also be a boost for John Gregitis, the newly appointed North America President. He takes on the role from Andy Brockhoff. Brockhoff now heads up the APAC region as President, Asia Pacific at Unit4 and is based in Australia.
Working together for mutual benefit
Americares is one of the first customers to use ERPx. It should therefore have early input into the direction of the solution, especially for non-profits. Unit4 benefits by having input from a complex multinational non-profit that will enable it to re-sell the solution more easily.
Americares will also benefit from a solution that is already designed for a rapid deployment into a non-profit organisation. Unit4 has a long history of, and considerable expertise in, providing solutions to non-profit organisations worldwide. It has developed a rapid implementation model to help Americares deploy the solution quickly.
One of the implementation tasks may be an integration to its project management solution. Americares implemented Oracle Primavera in 2011 as its project management solution after a donation by Oracle. However, the microservices-based architecture and open APIs available with ERPs should make that integration easier.
Americares Chief Financial Officer, Treasurer and Senior Vice President of Gift-in-Kind Operations Richard Trowbridge commented: “We have a deeply ingrained culture of resourcefulness and efficiency that promotes quick action and getting more done with less. With ERPx we aim to reduce manual operations and improve reporting capabilities while keeping costs under control. Unit4 also expressed a willingness to work with us to expand system functionality, which would allow the system to grow with us.”
Benefits for ERPx
There are several key benefits of ERPx that Americares is looking to leverage:
- The Unit4 non-profit implementation model. Leveraging pre-configured processes specific to the non-profit industry it helps to deliver a rapid ROI.
- The microservices architecture enables rapid integration for data and processes which is important for a complex organisation such as Americares
- The user interface is delivered through a modern mobile-enabled design. It also supports a natural language interface through the Unit4 native bot Wanda and collaboration tools such as Teams, Slack and Outlook.
- The mobile-enabled cloud-deployed solution enables Americares users to access data from anywhere with an internet connection using any device.
Enterprise Times: What does this mean
This is a significant win for Unit4. Oracle might have expected that it would select Fusion. Although there is no indication that this was a competitive win in the press release.
Regardless, if Unit4 can demonstrate a successful integration to Primavera it will have benefits. It will provide Primavera customers a choice if they look to replace their own ERP solutions. This is also a great start for ERPx, Unit4 in North America and ERPx. A major win at the start of the year will give the company a boost.
