Oracle Customer Success—CARE

Empowering Local Team to Care for the World's Most Vulnerable Populations

With a mission to end poverty and support social justice around the world, CARE.org (CARE) is globally recognized for its “unshakable commitment to the dignity of people.” The organization focuses on the most vulnerable populations around the world — women and children in impoverished areas — by providing community-based programs to facilitate equal rights, education, healthcare, agricultural, and economic opportunities. Following its core values of transformation, integrity, diversity, excellence, and equality, CARE has worked in 93 countries helping 63 million people through 950 programs designed to combat the effects of both natural and man-made disasters, such as hurricanes, earthquakes, and war. The organization’s staff usually works in remote, precarious, and dangerous environments around the globe.

The CARE field teams are empowered to manage budgets and staffing at the local level for its different grassroots programs. An out-of-date, legacy PeopleSoft Financials and Supply Chain Management 9.1 (FSCM 9.1) application served as the backbone of the organization’s operations. Application limitations and poor user experiences were requiring field teams to spend too much time managing their administrative duties, taking valuable time away from their primary mission.

The CARE IT team found themselves being pulled into administrative challenges of their own, often tying up its resources to manage the day-to-day availability and performance of its private cloud infrastructure (e.g., patching, troubleshooting, testing). Despite the IT team’s best efforts, the time spent managing their data center infrastructure detracted from their abilities to provide modern finance and HR productivity tools to the field staff.

The CARE IT team realized it needed to get out from under the stress of managing a private cloud, full-stack IT environment and transition to a more strategic IT organization. The opportunity to provide more productivity tools to the CARE field staff was of particular interest, but they were also wary about CARE’s ability to make such a significant transition without interrupting the work in the field. Extended downtime was not an option.

“As a global organization, CARE has a highly distributed workforce that has to access applications from remote locations. We wanted to our technology footprint to become more agile so we could better serve our staff, and in turn, better service vulnerable communities around the world.” - Mamuka Khantadze, Senior Director of Digital Operations, CARE.org

• Astute Provides a Technology Pathway to Oracle Cloud

  While investigating options to modernize their IT environment, the CARE IT team met Astute Business Solutions. From that initial interaction, Astute quickly gained the trust of the CARE organization by demonstrating their deep technical expertise in both Oracle applications and Oracle Cloud. But, even more importantly, Astute was willing to go above and beyond to support CARE’s lean IT staff by taking on additional project management tasks that are typically delegated to the customer’s IT team. Astute helped CARE pinpoint Oracle Cloud Infrastructure as the ideal platform to replace its private cloud. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure could automate and simplify many of the manual, infrastructure-management tasks that were tying up resources. Astute also recommended upgrading its legacy PeopleSoft FSCM 9.1 to FSCM 9.2, which would provide the most compelling productivity, security, and user experience for the field staff.

  Astute designed both a phased implementation strategy that addressed the CARE IT team’s continuity concerns and an aggressive plan to quickly migrate PeopleSoft using its Fast Track upgrade methodology. After the upgrade, Astute replaced the underlying technology platform with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

• Improved Staff Productivity, Strategic IT, and Lower Costs Focus Care Resources on Its Mission to Serve the Vulnerable

  Astute successfully migrated CARE’s mission-critical finance and HR applications from the legacy private cloud to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure on-time and within budget. The Astute team estimates that it was able to accelerate the traditional time-to-production for an infrastructure shift of this magnitude by 90% (see chart 1)—versus a traditional data center deployment. Astute was also able to lift and shift its legacy application globally to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure over a long weekend so that the CARE field staff didn’t experience any disruptions to their community programs.

  

  Astute also deployed a suite of Oracle Cloud productivity tools, like PeopleSoft Cloud Manager to automate application lifecycle management tasks, Database Cloud Services to automate database management, and Terraform to simplify additional infrastructure deployments down the road.

  Astute estimates that CARE’s IT team has reduced its overall infrastructure upgrade and maintenance efforts by 50% thanks to the simplicity of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure’s environment (see chart 2). These tools also allow CARE IT to spin up new environments and patch or update new images with the click of a button. And, with the PeopleSoft FSCM 9.2 upgrade, new releases will be deployed via the cloud, which means that the CARE field staff can immediately take advantage of new functionality and the IT team won’t get behind on future upgrade cycles. With the new Oracle Cloud Infrastructure platform, the CARE IT team is effectively out of the data center business because they rely on Oracle to host and manage their cloud infrastructure. At the same time, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure allows CARE to scale its systems up or down depending on the needs of its field teams, and the pay-as-you-go pricing model means the organization isn't paying for cloud capacity it doesn't need. Since CARE has been able to reduce its IT total cost of ownership, those savings now are being put to better use, funding social justice and poverty relief programs.

  

  The solution also provides the stringent security that CARE needed to maintain its global operations. And, equally as important for non-profits, is the ability to comply with very strict audit compliance regulations. As a 501(c)(3) organization, CARE has to provide its auditors with timely financial reports, such as SOC1, SOC2, and FASB on a regular basis. Failure to meet these regulations can result in revocation of the company's non-profit status. Astute helps CARE generate these reports from its PeopleSoft FSCM 9.2 application to meet these compliance requirements.

• Building Better Care for Tomorrow

  Now that the transition from the private cloud to OCI and the PeopleSoft application upgrades are complete, the CARE IT team is freed up to work with Astute to deliver new field staff productivity applications. The organization plans to launch PeopleSoft FSCM 9.2’s latest travel and expense module which includes a new mobile PeopleSoft Fluid UI interface to maximize the user experience across all device platforms. This will allow CARE field staff to more efficiently check their task lists, update current status of projects, submit progress reports, and track hours worked.

  The Astute team was thrilled to work with CARE, knowing that indirectly it was helping millions of underserved people overcome poverty, regain their dignity and independence after a natural disaster, and combat the struggles associated with conflicts around the world.

  CARE’s Impact Around the World*

  • Served 14 million people through humanitarian response.
  • 54 percent of all projects tested new ways to fight poverty.
  • Helped 1.2 million people live a life free from violence.
  • 60 percent of projects engaged in advocacy.
  • Supported 18.6 million people as they increased their food security and resilience to climate change.
  • Led an effort to secure historic, bipartisan support for an emergency law that provided $1 billion in U.S. humanitarian support for people around the world.
  • Equipped 33.6 million people with information and access to sexual, reproductive, and maternal health resources.
  • Economically empowered 2.6 million women by expanding access to financial services, employment, and equitable wages.

  ^{*CARE USA 2017 Annual Report}