Creating transparency and easing workflows in complex project economies

SAS helps DIHR to managing projects across the world with SAS® Financial Management

The international area of the Danish Institute for Human Rights (DIHR) is using SAS® Financial Management to ensure a full overview of complex project economy across the world.

DIHR has considerable international activities in over a dozen countries, collaboration with local government institutions, business and NGOs. 

DIHR’s funding comes from the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, from grants related to individual projects, as well as from companies and organisations that work with DIHR to ensure that adverse impact to human rights of business activities and initiatives are minimised and that the potential for positive contribution to human rights is realised. 

Jannick Svendsen is Team Lead, Economics, at DIHR. The team saw a need for a more efficient workflow that would give the team more insight and less repetition of tasks and transfer of data, with the inherent risk of added mistakes.

“We wanted to make a lot of our processes run more smoothly, including our reporting to both project managers and the DIHR management team. We worked with SAS to get our needs specified and ensure that we had the end users in mind.”

The transformation to using SAS Financial Management was implemented in a close cooperation between DIHR and SAS. This very active involvement from DIHR to really understand the data flow and the functionalities of SAS Financial Management ended up in a very structured and effective setup. A setup which DIHR can maintain and further develop themselves.

Managing projects across the world

As funding is generally tied to individual projects and thorough reporting is a prerequisite for receiving funds, DIHR needed to ensure that all expenditure reporting flowing from local collaborators and DIHR project managers working in the field was incorporated in budget overviews as soon as possible and in one view. Therefore, DIHR chose SAS Financial Management as the budget and reporting tool for its staff of more than 60 project managers dedicated to the oversight of projects both in Denmark and across the world. 

Project Manager Simen Høy Dypvik works with a number of DIHR projects in Western Africa. The distance and the many different stakeholders in the local projects means that keeping track of local expenses is difficult and sometimes delayed, making complete budget oversight more difficult. Simen has found that the flow of information has become much more efficient since the SAS Financial Management module was introduced.

“Before, we had to update several Excel-sheets and also enter the information into our accounting system. Then you would pull data out for making reports in yet another program. It was a long and strenuous process. Now, much more is automated, it is all integrated in one view and it saves a lot of time,” says Simen Høy Dyvik.

SAS Financial Management’s advanced calculation logic is set up to ensure that the correct calculation principles are used on the different project types. This setup ensures that the correct cost-, sale- and overhead prices/percentages – as defined for the individual resources and projects from the source systems – are used when revising and re-calculating the budget for each individual project.

Jannick Svendsen is glad to see the transformation towards a smoother process and easier workflows for project budgets, which also means better possibilities for prediction and agility as conditions change, for example the political climate in a country in which DIHR has operations.

“With the new system, we can react faster. Sometimes, you need to reassess how to best use your available resources in a given project, depending on how it is developing. We can see that for the upcoming fiscal year, we will have a better overview than in previous years”, says Jannick Svendsen.