Improving grants management with SAP and Oxygen
Oxygen is currently promoting the SAP Grants Management solution to give grant providers or recipients, such as state government departments, the tools to streamline the management of financial grants.
Improving efficiency and accountability in grants management are vital for organisations involved in issuing and receiving funds via grant or sponsorship programmes.
Public sector organisations are charged with managing rebates, grants and sponsorship programmes involving millions of dollars annually. However, many grantors struggle to manage these effectively due to cumbersome and inefficient business processes. Critical financial and business information is often stored in disparate systems across multiple locations, hampering attempts at automating the requisite process steps, document status and work tasks.
Oxygen’s Business Improvement Manager, Jens Tonn, says SAP is simplifying the grants process by providing an integrated view of the delivery, administrative and compliance requirements of grant programme management. "A great deal of documentation is generated when awarding grants. The workflow as a grant application proceeds from initiation through to approval and payment involves a number of milestones and can be extremely complicated."
On top of that, he says there are a number of key financial processes – such as establishing and monitoring budgets – that have to be properly administered. "The final piece of the puzzle is the reporting that needs to take place. All departments involved in grants management have to report to the appropriate minister or governing body, which requires comprehensive financial and statistical data to be collected and analysed."
Tonn says SAP’s grants management application provides a comprehensive case management layer to streamline the business processes and reduce the complexity involved in the grants environment. "SAP Grants Management helps organisations manage cases, document and records – on both paper and electronic formats – to support the file management and documentation requirements of the grant process," says Tonn.
The application specifically addresses the following key processes: program definition, application assessment, agreement, claim, change request, grant payment, monitoring and analysis. "The software improves access to grant services by supporting web-based processing of grants claims and change requests as well as automated application workflow for approvals and notification," says Tonn.
A wide range of benefits for both the grantor and grantee can be obtained when the grant management lifecycle is streamlined.
These include:
- Increased cost efficiency due to accurate revenue and expenses planning
- Efficient and cost effective deployment of people and systems to manage the workload
- Improved efficiency of grant processing through improved visibility of the various workflow stages
- Better customer service through efficient management of grant related documentation and transactions.
Read the full range of benefits of Oxygen's Grants Management SmartStart solution here
For more information on how Oxygen can help you with SAP Grants Management please email us
