The New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (MFAT) has a mission to promote regional prosperity, stability and security. They must ensure their $700m plus annual budget for international aid delivers maximum funds to projects and achieves real impacts.
The Ministry’s International Aid program manages over 1000 active contracts with third parties worldwide and has staff spread across the globe. Access, security and streamlining administration and management demanded a completely new and innovative approach to aid program management.
Program staff needed a common solution to support work as its done, harnessing data to drive and enhance program administration and reporting.
Driving the Mission with Data
Harnessing data is at the centre of digital transformation in government. Governments everywhere must leverage their data resources to drive more efficient and better administration.
By implementing Enquire MFAT staff worldwide are connected with a common tool where all can engage on program activities and management, relying on the same data and the same system in real-time. This ability to connect individuals, teams and partners makes MFAT more efficient and responsive, reducing administrative overheads so more aid funds get to the intended target.
Enquire MFAT saves time and reduces risks with a unified access to master data to drive their business processes like intelligently pre-populated contracts and templates or triggering important milestones. With data at its core, MFAT has visibility across any aspect of their aid management program enhancing their ability to maximise aid impact.
MFAT’s aid program management team have gained end-to-end visibility and control covering all aspects of managing their aid program, including program, activity, contract, forecasting, financial, and results management as well as contact relationship management.
Tackling such a complex and large program Tactiv focused its energy, and Enquire’s capability, on removing barriers to doing work the right way. This empowers MFAT staff to achieve their goals more effectively and efficiently. It removed the need for work arounds and ad hoc processes, so staff actively engaged Enquire as they could quickly realise the benefit in their day-to-day work.
With staff and partner buy-in Enquire improves the Ministry’s ability to track and report on what matters at every point in the program lifecycle, be it real-time project budgets or reporting on aid impact.
Leading International Innovation for Aid Management
Enquire is designed specifically for the challenges of the publicly funded social impact sector. With Enquire the Ministry now has a sector leading capability in reporting against key international commitments and measurement frameworks.
Traditionally meeting the reporting needs of frameworks like GIIN or IATI meant complicated and time-consuming efforts to collect and collate data across thousands of contracts, projects and local office progress reports. The portfolio-program-project structure at the core of Enquire reflects how publicly funded programs operate. Leveraging this logic, staff from remote field offices in the South Pacific to the Wellington head office are able to interact and deliver their work, while the system automatically harnesses and unifies data for accurate, up-to-date and transparent reporting.
By transforming how staff engage and interact Enquire eliminated the data silos and disparate systems that were a barrier to improving MFAT’s aid management. The system’s flexible “no code” configurability means MFAT can be responsive to ever-changing business needs all the while maintaining data integrity.
Enquire went live across the New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affair and Trade’s International Aid Program in October 2018. The Ministry and Tactiv developed a trusted and mutually beneficial collaborative working partnership focused on delivering an innovative, cost effective and future oriented software system. Critically the software integrates with other key business systems to support end-to-end program management.
Tactiv Client Services and technical team provide full Enquire support for the Ministry’s International Aid program team. Tactiv will continue to work closely with the Ministry, building on their experience and expertise to develop innovative capabilities to further improve the Ministry’s aid program outcomes, and Enquire, so Tactiv clients can make better decisions every day.
