Cancer Research

Enabling Cancer Research UK to make tangible time savings compared to their previous method – including four or five days on importing users alone

The problem

Despite the not-for-profit status, a charity is still a business, and its success depends in part on the smooth running of the back-office operations. Therefore, ensuring that the business systems deployed by Cancer Research UK are as efficient as possible is key to the running of the charity and keeping costs to a minimum, so that donations can be spent on achieving its vision of bringing forward the day when all cancers are cured.

The charity had been using Unit4 ERP for over 10 years but wanted to upgrade from their unsupported version to the latest milestone of Business World.

They had researched numerous ways to make the upgrade as painless as possible but decided to use the traditional method of table writes for data loads. However, they encountered indexing problems, which they found to be laborious and time consuming, so needed an alternative approach.

The solution

Working with Embridge to understand different data handling options, the GCON4 MFL solution was chosen.

This solution streamlines data migration and maintenance of Unit4 Business World enabling customers to bulk import, update and validate master files and transactional data quickly and easily.moother implementation – ensuring all parties were aligned from the outset.

The result

GCON4 MFL immediately enabled Cancer Research UK to make tangible time savings compared to their previous method – including four or five days on importing users alone.

These time savings meant they could get on with other tasks more quickly and, now the tool is firmly embedded into their regular routines, the team are looking at other ways to use it going forward. These tasks could include using the solution for exchange rates, address loads, posting journals, and loading resources, speeding up daily processes in hours, not days or months.

“Just the process to import users saved us around four or five days using GCON4 MFL over the traditional methods we used. Had we used the solution from the start, it could have saved us months and not just days – our only regret is that we didn’t find the solution earlier!”

Ken Edwards Senior Systems Accountant at Cancer Research UK