The Royal Air Force Benevolent Fund was founded in 1919 by the man who, more than any other, was responsible for the creation of the RAF, Marshal of the Royal Air Force Lord Trenchard. In 1999 the RAFBF was awarded a Royal Charter. The Fund offers assistance to all past and present Royal Air Force members who entered productive service and their dependants who are in financial distress, regardless of rank, job or length of service.

Industry
Not for Profit

Locations
London, Fairford Gloucestershire,
Edinburgh

Deployment Summary

Deployment of Microsoft Great Plains in London HQ

Seamless integration with Hamlet bespoke welfare management system

Touchstone and Hamlet provided business consultancy, hardware procurement, software development and configuration, networking, project management, end user training and one-stop support service.

Benefits

Ensures rapid, consistent and accurate financial reporting.

Provides seamlessly shared information about Fund beneficiaries and intelligent tracking of cases over their life time.

Empowering staff to be more effective in answering beneficiary enquiries

Ability to recruit and retain staff using latest Windows-based technologies that support a low cost of ownership

The Royal Air Force Benevolent Fund exists to provide assistance to those of the extended Royal Air Force Family who need support as a consequence of sickness, disability, accident,
infirmity, poverty or other adversity. This extended family embraces all ranks, male and female, who are serving or have served in the Royal Air Force
or its associated Air Forces and their dependents. Welfare work carried out by the Fund is very wide-ranging and has diversified and grown considerably over the years, and now, in addition
to general welfare assistance, embraces Housing, Education and Care Services, including its own and jointly owned Nursing, Residential and shortterm Care Homes. The Fund identified at a strategic level the need for a forward-looking integrated systems based solution to manage their welfare activity. It was recognised that the existing technology infrastructure was contributing to inefficient ways of working and that an effective technology strategy was needed to record,
administer and monitor fund assistance quickly and effectively. To help the Fund find the right technology solution, the decision was made in 1999 to hire management consultants from Ernst & Young to conduct a business practice review. They worked closely with representatives from across the
organisation went through an extensive process of defining the Funds' needs. Michael Vearncombe, Director of Administration at the Fund comments:
"We conducted a business practice review not simply to deal with information systems, but to look at the whole extent of our business practices.
The report Ernst & Young produced clearly identified the need to invest in new technologies. It advised against bespoke software, where appropriate, on the grounds of cost of support and development. However, in order to meet our very specific welfare requirements, there would have to be an element of configuration in whichever systems we eventually opted for."

The Fund began a rigorous and stringent evaluation of systems from external software providers. SORP compliancy was an important factor in singling out the accountancy software. It chose Touchstone and Hamlet as their partners and the Microsoft Great Plains product to handle the complex accounting requirements of the organisation. Hamlet proposed building a central database to manage welfare casework that would integrate with the back office Microsoft Great Plains system. Michael pinpoints three main reasons for the eventual choice of the Touchstone, Hamlet, Great Plains solution: "firstly, the relationship with Hamlet was longstanding and we were confident that they understood our business requirements; secondly in choosing Touchstone, the Fund was
aware of the benefits of working with a company that had worked with other charities and knew best practice in the industry; and lastly and most
importantly, the combined Welfare Management and Microsoft Great Plains solution provided a seamlessly integrated, intelligent IT solution with
Windows look and feel." The Fund places a lot of value on developing relationships with their suppliers and were confident that a collaborative team-led approach
would work well at meeting the Fund's needs . "We have had a long association with Hamlet, close to 15 years - when they developed the legacy bespoke welfare and finance system, says Michael. "Hamlet had so much knowledge about the way that the system had developed and how we work - and that knowledge was important to retain for the future." "Working together as a partnership is so important - there are benefits to Hamlet and Touchstone and there are benefits to us, we get a much-improved application and by and large everyone is happy."

The implementation of the systems was phased, so that progress could be tracked carefully. Phase one involved setting up Microsoft Great Plains and phase 2, involved the development of the integrated welfare management system. The Microsoft Great Plains system went live at the beginning of January 2001. Unlike a corporate, the Fund has financial
arrangements with beneficiaries which are of necessity very flexible. The financial operations of the Fund and the year-end in particular are in turn very involved. Paul Duffin, Technical Director at Hamlet who coordinated and liaised with the parties involved comments: "There was a lot of support from Touchstone during the implementation period, but the project was an ambitious one, and to get the year-end account produced on the new system was a real achievement." The Fund has benefited from Microsoft Great Plains' ease of reporting.

Alan Webb, Deputy Director of Finance, at the Fund says: "We are very happy indeed with the Microsoft Great Plains system. On the old system, if you wanted to produce a report you would effectively have to make a request to the IT department, which was quite a protracted process. Using the old system it took about two days to write a management report, it now takes about two hours. We are now a completely hands on account function. We no longer have to involve the IT department to produce any of our reports. We have the flexibility to construct a report in any way that we like and produce it ad hoc, which is wonderful." In addition to providing better management information, Microsoft Great Plains produces exception reports that tell the Fund whether they have duplicated or missed accounts. "Using the old system, if we ran a report and checked the integrity of that report and found that it did not tie up with what we were expecting, we would literally have to manually tick off every account to locate the disparity," says Alan.

"With an organisation that has over 5,000 nominal accounts, that was an immense task." The real benefit to the finance department has been the Windows-based functionality enabling selection to be made at the click of a button, which has resulted in better, more efficient ways of working. In addition, given the kind of organisation the Fund is, the ability to easily locate relevant data is crucial. "If anyone wanted to find out what a nominal account was, we had a large folder with a list of numbers that one has to trawl through. Now we have a drop-down menu and a search function, so you can just type in a key word," says Alan. "We can have different windows and functions open simultaneously. This is valuable because of the type or organisation we are and the number of enquiries we receive from beneficiaries on a regular and ad hoc basis. With Microsoft Great Plains, you can bring up information from any part of the system." "All the Windows type functionality, drop down menus, and search and select functionality is excellent. The net result is that the system cuts out a lot of time and effort and we are able to access a lot more information." With phase 1 in place, phase 2 roll out of the welfare management system was progressed at the beginning of 2001. The welfare management system deals with the processing of beneficiary cases, namely in the areas of Housing; Care Services and Education. It links directly into Microsoft Great Plains and captures all transactions that take place.
Duffin explains the technology and resulting benefits of the new integrated welfare management solution in terms of greater control and transparency: "The interaction between the Microsoft Great Plains system and the bespoke welfare system is so seamless, it is effectively one system. Everyone has access to the same system and the same data sources with various controls and user permissions by division." All the Fund's grant and loan arrangements need to be managed carefully - on a case by case basis and over extended periods of time.

A case tracking facility is incorporated into the system and automates this process. In addition, the database is easier to search and to access. "When you have lots of changes made to a single case, for example, changes of address, surname, or type of claim involved, keeping track of these changes can be onerous," says Paul. "With the new streamlined welfare system, when you search on a person, you access a
comprehensive case history." The Fund appreciate the flexibility of the Microsoft Great Plains and Hamlet Welfare management solution, that can suit their current and future working methods. We now recognise that it is easier to keep people abreast of the technology, and in the long-term it is far more cost-efficient, in terms of development, training and staff morale. We are now in an excellent position to embrace change and envisage making more effective use of the management information capabilities of Microsoft Great Plains. The Touchstone, Hamlet and Microsoft Great Plains solution means we are able to dispense
with some out-moded and unnecessarily cumbersome ways of doing things. Ultimately, this will allow us to deliver welfare more efficiently and better safeguard the interests of past and present Royal Air Force members and
their dependents.

Not for Profit Division
Advances in computing technology are transforming the performance and management of Not for Profit
organisations. Not for Profit organisations need systems that can maximise their resources, deliver flexible, accurate and timely management statutory
reports, as well as better budgetary systems to improve accountability.
Touchstone boasts a dedicated team of specialists with extensive applied experience in this sector, helping to ensure that technology implementations
solve core organisational challenges: capturing and preserving internal knowledge, boosting productivity,
and providing timely and effective information to managers, donors and trustees.