The Canadian Museum of History (CMH) operates the Canadian Museum of History, the Canadian War Museum and the Virtual Museum of New France. In addition to its mandate to protect and curate items of national cultural importance, the Museums function as centres for research and public information on the social, military and human history of Canada.
The Museum had long run on a legacy ERP system which made reporting a long and highly labour intensive process.
“We had been using an old ERP system but we’d struggled as a finance team to get information out of it. It was very old, not user friendly and very labour intensive. Reports came out in PDF format which then had to be manually transferred into Excel.”
Linda Hurdle
Chief Financial Officer, Canadian Museum of History
The system, by its nature also dictated many of the processes and procedures at the organization and it therefore had a broad impact museum-wide. Processes were manual and paper-heavy resulting in time consuming delays, inefficiencies and frustration, organization wide.
Having assessed their requirements and discussed possibilities with Sparkrock, a project was undertaken to replace the existing ERP system with Sparkrock 2016.
Augmenting the backend, Sparkrock Employee Center was installed, distributing role specific access to certain functionality, allowing non-core users the ability to view a report, approve an invoice, check budgetary status etc. All of this had to be completed in a very short timeframe (4 months) in time for April 30th year end.
“Generating the quarterly reports for the Board used to be incredibly stressful for the entire finance division. But that’s not the case anymore,”
Linda Hurdle
Chief Financial Officer, Canadian Museum of History
1. Reporting & Analysis
Now that the labour intensive element of the reporting function has been replaced, the stress of the quarterly reporting and reporting up to the Board has been removed. What used to take 3 full time people 2 days (2,880 minutes) to output from the old ERP can now be generated by a single click, in less than a minute, a 288,000% improvement.
2. Better Decision Making
With improved reporting and analysis on accurate up-to-date figures, the Board and senior management now have the data and the time they need to make more informed decisions to run the organization.
3. Total Procurement Visibility
The Board gained end-to-end visibility on from purchase order to payment, with requisition approval workflows and automated orders based on business rules.
4. Improved Staff Productivity
Staff are no longer burdened with manual processes such as re-keying of information or having to deal with mountains of paper invoices.
5. Integrated Solutions
Using solutions from Microsoft ensures that integration and inter-operability is built into the products at a base code level.
6. Much More Information
Much Better Access: With the solutions they now have in place, Finance staff at CMH can gain access to more information and drill down into records to see what is behind the topline numbers.