By Lisa Martin
The human rights group International Justice Mission (IJM) has an exceptional track record of protecting the poor from violence in developing nations throughout Asia, Africa, and Latin America. IJM partners with local authorities to rescue victims of violence, bring criminals to justice, restore survivors, and strengthen justice systems.
IJM’s global team of approximately 900 has spent more than 20 years on the front lines fighting oppression and slavery, with remarkable results. Since 1997, IJM has rescued more than 49,000 people from slavery, trained over 67,000 officials, and protected more than 150 million people from violence.
In the last five years, the Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit has doubled its staff and revenue. To support its model and global growth, its executive team wanted to streamline financial management to gain better insight into things like budgets and actuals, and reduce manual data work that consumed time and money.
Because IJM’s leadership was keen to build a platform for the long term and improve its overall IT infrastructure, it launched a cloud strategy. It rolled out Workday Financial Management at its U.S. headquarters to replace Blackbaud Financial Edge, and also upgraded its HR system to Workday Human Capital Management and its CRM application to Salesforce Sales Cloud.
In time, IJM plans to globally deploy Workday Financial Management to replace QuickBooks Online at its 21 field offices around the world. But in the interim, it needed to integrate the Workday system at headquarters with satellite QuickBooks applications for greater automation and visibility.
As outlined in our new customer success story, IJM turned to Boomi Integration to address that need and provide an agile, scalable platform that could address any integration requirement.
Learn how Boomi has helped IJM streamline fundraising with the Boomi Platform. Read the blog post.
Boomi Facilitates IJM’s Global Cloud Strategy
IJM first deployed Boomi Integration to extract financial data from QuickBooks at field offices, transform it, and load it into Workday Financial Management at headquarters without manual intervention. It’s also leveraging Boomi to integrate Salesforce with Workday Financial Management, and any new systems IJM deploys.
“With Boomi, we can centrally control and maintain the data in Workday Financial Management regardless of what international office it’s from,” says Kirk Mitchell, IJM’s director of global consolidation and reporting. “The data comes in cleaner and much faster compared to our previous process. We now have new use cases to explore with Workday, such as financial statement consolidation across our international offices.”
Boomi enables the finance team to work more efficiently and devote time to more critical initiatives, instead of laboring with tedious manual accounting work.
“It used to take our finance team three to four days to get QuickBooks journal entries from all field offices into Workday Financial Management,” Mitchell says. “With Boomi, we’re working to cut that in half.”
Boomi is enabling IJM to extract more value from its investment in cloud technologies such as Workday and Salesforce, and use data more strategically to heighten its social impact. Boomi is central to IJM’s goal of making Workday Financial Management its single platform to transact and analyze data across all locations.
Boomi is helping IJM facilitate its cloud strategy by:
- Providing an integration foundation to reliably connect Workday and other cloud applications
- Automating data transfer between QuickBooks Online at its field offices and Workday Financial Management at headquarters
- Leveraging built-in connectors to standardize integrations, eliminate the costs of custom Workday Studio integrations, and quickly develop and deploy integrations
To learn more about how IJM is using Boomi for its Workday integrations, read the case study.
IJM Unlocks More Value From Its Workday Investment
IJM Senior Data Integration Engineer Michael Wong wanted to use native tools and connectors in the Workday Studio integration package to connect with QuickBooks Online, but this required coding skills his small team simply didn’t have.
“Because we didn’t have the resources internally, we had to hire external consultants to build a custom Studio integration between Workday and other cloud applications. This was expensive to set up and maintain, and if something broke, we had to pay an external consultant to fix it,” Wong says.
Ultimately, Wong’s team decided to limit custom Workday Studio integrations and instead use Boomi’s industry-proven, cloud-native integration platform to improve multiple business processes.
Boomi helps IJM avoid some of Workday’s scheduling limitations. For example, IJM had a process to update donation records in Salesforce after they were loaded into Workday Financial Management, but the process fell apart because some of the other system tools weren’t maintained. So it uses Boomi to initiate some of the scheduled integrations and reconcile donations between Salesforce and Workday.
Additionally, Boomi is enabling IJM to harness more value from Workday Financial Management, which has the ability to run global financial consolidations between field offices and headquarters.
For example, IJM has been able to consolidate financial records for its UK office with headquarters. Workday enables IJM to set its field offices up as legal entities separate from headquarters, and do eliminations much more automatically.
Improved Business-IT Collaboration and Productivity
To empower and scale the work it’s doing in the field, IJM needed the foundational base Boomi delivers to reduce and automate some of the day-to-day administrative tasks that took time away from vital field work.
Before Boomi, IJM’s Workday analysts had to run jobs every day to decrypt files. That’s now it’s automated with Boomi, and analysts are free to work on more strategic projects.
Additionally, Boomi helps to improve data accuracy between Workday and Salesforce for reporting and metrics, as IT no longer has to do manual updates, reducing the likelihood of errors. IJM has seen increased collaboration between Workday and Salesforce business users and IT to identify and solve problems.
Why Boomi?
IJM needed fast, agile integration amid growing complexity across its data and application environment. It chose Boomi for these reasons:
- A proven cloud partner: Boomi’s partnerships with Workday and Salesforce were key, as was Boomi’s ability to scale.
- Cloud-native: Built from the ground up to be cloud-native, Boomi provides elasticity and scalability while eliminating the need for IJM to purchase, implement, manage, and maintain hardware for hosting software.
- Low-code development: Boomi’s intuitive, low-code interface meant that IJM wouldn’t need integration developers with special skills. One reason IJM chose Boomi is that it has products that don’t require a developer. IJM doesn’t have a huge IT shop, so a platform that business analysts and administrators could manage and use was a big selling point.
- Reusability: Boomi enables IJM to reuse business flows on many processes so that its IT team can leverage institutional knowledge within the system against other endpoints that it integrates.
- Reputation: In addition to the 11,000+ customers it works with, Boomi receives high praise from analysts like Gartner, Forrester, and Ovum. Year after year Boomi continues to be a market leader cloud-based hybrid integration platforms.
What’s Next?
IJM now has the foundation to continue unlocking even more value from its Workday investment. It plans to use Boomi with Workday Human Capital Management to revamp employee onboarding and off-boarding processes.
IJM sees additional use cases with Boomi, including integrating Workday with Microsoft Active Directory and using Workday Adaptive Planning for budgeting and forecasting.
“With Boomi, we’re on our way to accomplishing our goal of using Workday Financial Management as one global system to transact and analyze data,” Mitchell says. “Looking down the road in five years, Boomi is the system that’s going to grow with us.”
To learn more about how IJM is transforming operations with Boomi, read the case study.