Project Management Helps AmeriCares Deliver International Aid
- by Sylvie MacKenzie, PMP
Excerpt from PROFIT - ORACLE - by Alison Weiss
Handle with Care
Sound project management helps AmeriCares bring international aid to those in need.
The stakes are always high for AmeriCares. On a mission to restore
health and save lives during times of disaster, the nonprofit
international relief and humanitarian aid organization delivers donated
medicines, medical supplies, and humanitarian aid to people in the U.S.
and around the globe. Founded in 1982 with the express mission of
responding as quickly and efficiently as possible to help people in
need, the Stamford, Connecticut-based AmeriCares has delivered more than
US$10.5 billion in aid to 147 countries over the past three decades.
Launch the Slideshow
“It’s
critically important to us that we steward all the donations and that
the medical supplies and medicines get to people as quickly as possible
with no loss,” says Kate Sears, senior vice president for finance and
technology at AmeriCares. “Whether we’re shipping IV solutions to
victims of cholera in Haiti or antibiotics to Somali famine victims, we
need to get the medicines there sooner because it means more people will
be helped and lives improved or even saved.”
Ten
years ago, the tracking systems used by AmeriCares associates were
paper-based. In recent years, staff started using spreadsheets, but the
tracking processes were not standardized between teams. “Every team was
tracking completely different information,” says Megan McDermott, senior
associate, Sub-Saharan Africa partnerships, at AmeriCares. “It was just
a few key things. For example, we tracked the date a shipment was
supposed to arrive and the date we got reports from our partner that a
hospital received aid on their end.”
While
the data was accurate, much detail was being lost in the process.
AmeriCares management knew it could do a better job of tracking this
enterprise data and in 2011 took a significant step by implementing Oracle’s Primavera P6 Professional Project Management.
“It’s a comprehensive solution that has helped us improve the
monitoring and controlling processes. It has allowed us to do our
distribution better,” says Sears.
In
addition, the implementation effort has been a change agent, helping
AmeriCares leadership rethink project management across the entire
organization. Initially, much of the focus was on standardizing
processes, but staff members also learned the importance of thinking
proactively to prevent possible problems and evaluating results to
determine if goals and objectives are truly being met. Such data about
process efficiency and overall results is critical not only to
AmeriCares staff but also to the donors supporting the organization’s
life-saving missions.
Efficiency Saves Lives
One
of AmeriCares’ core operations is to gather product donations from the
private sector, establish where the most-urgent needs are, and solicit
monetary support to send the aid via ocean cargo or airlift to welfare-
and health-oriented nongovernmental organizations, hospitals, health
networks, and government ministries based in areas in need. In 2011
alone, AmeriCares sent more than 3,500 shipments to 95 countries in
response to both ongoing humanitarian needs and more than two dozen
emergencies, including deadly tornadoes and storms in the U.S. and the
devastating tsunami in Japan.
When it
comes to nonprofits in general, donors want to know that the charitable
organizations they support are using funds wisely. Typically, nonprofits
are evaluated by donors in terms of efficiency, an area where
AmeriCares has an excellent reputation: 98 percent of expenses go
directly to supporting programs and less than 2 percent represent
administrative and fundraising costs.
Donors,
however, should look at more than simple efficiency, says Peter York,
senior partner and chief research and learning officer at TCC Group, a
nonprofit consultancy headquartered in New York, New York. They should
also look at whether organizations have the systems in place to sustain
their missions and continue to thrive.
An
expert on nonprofit organizational management, York has spent years
studying sustainable charitable organizations. He defines them as
nonprofits that are able to achieve the ongoing financial support to
stay relevant and continue doing core mission work. In his analysis of
well over 2,500 larger nonprofits, York has found that many are not
sustaining, and are actually scaling back in size.
“One
of the biggest challenges of nonprofit sustainability is the general
public’s perception that every dollar donated has to go only to the
delivery of service,” says York. “What our data shows is that there are
some fundamental capacities that have to be there in order for
organizations to sustain and grow.”
York’s
research highlights the importance of data-driven leadership at
successful nonprofits. “You’ve got to have the tools, the systems, and
the technologies to get objective information on what you do, the people
you serve, and the results you’re achieving,” says York. “If leaders
don’t have the knowledge and the data, they can’t make the strategic
decisions about programs to take organizations to the next level.”
Historically,
AmeriCares associates have used time-tested and cost-effective
strategies to ship and then track supplies from donation to delivery to
their destinations in designated time frames. When disaster strikes,
AmeriCares ships by air and generally pulls out all the stops to deliver
the most urgently needed aid within the first few days and weeks. Then,
as situations stabilize, AmeriCares turns to delivering sea containers
for the postemergency and ongoing aid so often needed over the long
term.
According to McDermott, getting a
shipment out the door is fairly complicated, requiring as many as five
different AmeriCares teams collaborating together. The entire process
can take months—from when products are received in the warehouse and
deciding which recipients to allocate supplies to, to getting customs
and governmental approvals in place, actually shipping products, and
finally ensuring that the products are received in-country.
Delivering
that aid is no small affair. “Our volume exceeds half a billion dollars
a year worth of donated medicines and medical supplies, so it’s a
sizable logistical operation to bring these products in and get them out
to the right place quickly to have the most impact,” says Sears. “We
really pride ourselves on our controls and efficiencies.”
Adding
to that complexity is the fact that the longer it takes to deliver aid,
the more dire the human need can be. Any time AmeriCares associates can
shave off the complicated aid delivery process can translate into lives
saved. “It’s really being able to track information consistently that
will help us to see where are the bottlenecks and where can we work on
improving our processes,” says McDermott.
Setting a Standard
Productivity
and information management improvements were key objectives for
AmeriCares when staff began the process of implementing Oracle’s
Primavera solution. But before configuring the software, the staff
needed to take the time to analyze the systems already in place.
According to Greg Loop, manager of database systems at AmeriCares, the
organization received guidance from several consultants, including Rich
D’Addario, consulting project manager in the Primavera Global Business
Unit at Oracle, who was instrumental in shepherding the critical
requirements-gathering phase.
D’Addario
encouraged staff to begin documenting shipping processes by considering
the order in which activities occur and which ones are dependent on
others to get accomplished. This exercise helped everyone realize that
to be more efficient, they needed to keep track of shipments in a more
standard way.
“The staff didn’t recognize
formal project management methodology,” says D’Addario. “But they did
understand what the most important things are and that if they go wrong,
an entire project can go off course.”
Before,
if a boatload of supplies was being sent to Haiti and there was a
problem somewhere, a lot of time was taken up finding out where the
problem was—because staff was not tracking things in a standard way. As a
result, even more time was needed to find possible solutions to the
problem and alert recipients that the aid might be delayed.
“For
everyone to put on the project manager hat and standardize the way
every single thing is done means that now the whole organization is on
the same page as to what needs to occur from the time a hurricane hits
Haiti and when a boat pulls in to unload supplies,” says D’Addario.
With
so much care taken to put a process foundation firmly in place,
configuring the Primavera solution was actually quite simple. Specific
templates were set up for different types of shipments, and dashboards
were implemented to provide executives with clear overviews of every
project in the system. AmeriCares’ Loop reports that system planning,
refining, and testing, followed by writing up documentation and
training, took approximately four months.
The
system went live in spring 2011 at AmeriCares’ Connecticut
headquarters. While the nonprofit has an international presence, with
warehouses in Europe and offices in Haiti, India, Japan, and Sri Lanka,
most donated medicines come from U.S. entities and are shipped from the
U.S. out to the rest of the world. In addition, all shipments are
tracked from the U.S. office.
AmeriCares
doesn’t expect the Primavera system to take months off the shipping
time, especially for sea containers. However, any time saved is still
important because it will allow aid to be delivered to people more
quickly at a lower overall cost. “If we can trim a day or two here or
there, that can translate into lives that we’re saving, especially in
emergency situations,” says Sears.
A Cultural Change
Beyond
the measurable benefits that come with IT-driven process improvement,
AmeriCares management is seeing a change in culture as a result of the
Primavera project. One change has been treating every shipment of aid as
a project, and everyone involved with facilitating shipments as a
project manager. “This is a revolutionary concept for us,” says
McDermott. “Before, we were used to thinking we were doing
logistics—getting a container from point A to point B without looking at
it as one project and really understanding what it meant to manage it.”
AmeriCares
staff is also happy to report that collaboration within the
organization is much more efficient. When someone creates a shipment in
the Primavera system, the same shared template is used, which means
anyone can log in to the system to see the status of a shipment.
Knowledgeable staff can access a shipment project to help troubleshoot a
problem. Management can easily check the status of projects across the
organization. “Dashboards are really useful,” says McDermott. “Instead
of going into the details of each project, you can just see the
high-level real-time information at a glance.”
The
new system is helping team members focus on proactively managing
shipments rather than simply reacting when problems occur. For example,
when a container is shipped, documents must be included for customs
clearance. Now, the shipping template has built-in reminders to prompt
team members to ask for copies of these documents from freight
forwarders and to follow up with partners to discover if a shipment is
on time. In the past, staff may not have worked on securing these
documents until they’d been notified a shipment had arrived in-country.
Another
benefit of capturing and adopting best practices within the Primavera
system is that staff training is easier. “Capturing the processes in
documented steps and milestones allows us to teach new staff members how
to do their jobs faster,” says Sears. “It provides them with the
knowledge of their predecessors so they don’t have to keep reinventing
the wheel.”
With the Primavera system
already generating positive results, management is eager to take
advantage of advanced capabilities. Loop is working on integrating the
company’s proprietary inventory management system with the Primavera
system so that when logistics or warehousing operators input data, the
information will automatically go into the Primavera system. In the
past, this information had to be manually keyed into spreadsheets, often
leading to errors.
Mining Historical Data
Another
feature on the horizon for AmeriCares is utilizing Primavera P6
Professional Project Management reporting capabilities. As the system
begins to include more historical data, management soon will be able to
draw on this information to conduct analysis that has not been possible
before and create customized reports.
For
example, at the beginning of the shipment process, staff will be able
to use historical data to more accurately estimate how long the approval
process should take for a particular country. This could help ensure
that food and medicine with limited shelf lives do not get stuck in
customs or used beyond their expiration dates.
The
historical data in the Primavera system will also help AmeriCares with
better planning year to year. The nonprofit’s staff has always put
together a plan at the beginning of the year, but this has been very
challenging simply because it is impossible to predict disasters. Now,
management will be able to look at historical data and see trends and
statistics as they set current objectives and prepare for future need.
In
addition, this historical data will provide AmeriCares management with
the ability to review year-end data and compare actual project results
with goals set at the beginning of the year—to see if desired outcomes
were achieved and if there are areas that need improvement.
It’s
this type of information that is so valuable to donors. And, according
to York, project management software can play a critical role in
generating the data to help nonprofits sustain and grow.
“It
is important to invest in systems to help replicate, expand, and
deliver services,” says York. “Project management software can help
because it encourages nonprofits to examine program or service changes
and how to manage moving forward.”
Sears
believes that AmeriCares donors will support the return on investment
the organization will achieve with the Primavera solution. “It won’t be
financial returns, but rather how many more people we can help for a
given dollar or how much more quickly we can respond to a need,” says
Sears. “I think donors are receptive to such arguments.”
And
for AmeriCares, it is all about the future and increasing results. The
project management environment currently may be quite simple, but IT
staff plans to expand the complexity and functionality as the
organization grows in its knowledge of project management and the goals
it wants to achieve. “As we use the system over time, we’ll continue to
refine our best practices and accumulate more data,” says Sears. “It
will advance our ability to make better data-driven decisions.”
