The Cerebral Palsy League of Queensland (CPLQ) has streamlined its financial, stock control and customer-facing processes to overcome costly overheads and laborious processes.
The league provides more than $27 million worth of specialised equipment, therapy, support and services each year to children and adults with cerebral palsy.
With more than 300 grants to manage, CPLQ needed a solution which could assist with instantly generating financial reports to government and board members as well as providing a platform to handle future growth across its diverse businesses.
According to CPLQ CEO Bruce Milligan, the lack of financial reporting integration had led to pressures on staff and resources through time consuming, laborious processes.
“We didn’t have information systems or where we did, the systems were outdated and hopeless. The organization has done much work over recent years to fix its financial problems and reverse 16 years of consecutive deficits,” Milligan said.
“[This] was hampering how far we could go with this work and the development of the organization. So we started with a needs analysis, then prepared specifications and went to tender 18 months ago.”
After reviewing more than 16 tenders the league chose the submission by Professional Advantage and Epicor Software.
The solution will replace CPLQ’s ageing Titan financial system, as well as a range of both automated and manual systems, with Web-based financial reporting, CRM and HR and payroll.
“From our review, we thought the Epicor product set and Professional Advantage service and support were the closest match to our business needs. We have a complex grant system to manage and we need to be able to track staff member time versus the applicable grant against the particular client,” Milligan said.
CPLQ has initially purchased 10 licences of eBackOffice, 20 licences of eFrontoffice and 20 of eIntelligence Explorer. Implementation commences in September and is scheduled to be completed next year.
One of the most significant benefits of the implementation is the potential cost saving, with Milligan believing the organization could save around $250,000 per year.
“With one fully integrated financials and client management solution residing on one server providing for reduced hardware requirements and greater security, we’ll enjoy savings in reworking data and have a clear audit trail of who entered data and when it was last updated,” Milligan said.
Staff at the organisation’s headquarters in Brisbane will have access to Epicor’s eBackoffice function while all other users will use eFrontoffice with integration to eBackoffice.