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Come Back Alive is a charitable foundation whose mission is to provide competent assistance to the army. It is also a non-governmental organization that deals with analytics in the security and defense sector and implements projects for rehabilitating veterans through sports. The Foundation regularly reports on its operations to all donors, government agencies, and the Ukrainian society, having raised a total of UAH 12+ billion since 2014.

The Foundation's activities aimed at ensuring the technological edge of Ukraine’s Defense Forces over the enemy are vitally important for the country. Here are some figures showing its achievements in ammunition procurement: 4,690+ units of collective infantry weapons, 1,600+ pickup trucks, 9,950+ units of thermal imaging and night optics, 10,500+ quadcopters, 90+ unmanned reconnaissance systems and Bayraktar TB2 strike systems, and 25,650 FPV drones.

Background

The Come Back Alive Foundation needed a unified IT system to manage its operations and replace the existing legacy patchwork software, including 1C (made in Russia), Asana, Dilovod, and Excel.

There are several prerequisites for building a single information space for an organization: a unified system of configurations, administration rules, centralized classifiers and directories. Starting in 2023, the no-code/low-code platform IT-Enterprise has been tackling these tasks and driving the Foundation’s digitalization.

“It was crucial for us to manage all areas of the Foundation's operations quickly, transparently, and with maximum flexibility. This was the top priority goal for our team in 2022. Without much hesitation, we chose this Ukrainian vendor with appropriate expertise, experience, and resources. The expected results were transparent digital processes, real-time data, and accurate analytics. All this now facilitates our daily fundraising, procurement, transfer and reporting activities,” said Taras Chmut, Director of the Come Back Alive Foundation.

Digital transformation project

With the help of IT-Enterprise tools, the Foundation's end-to-end digital business processes have been optimized and implemented in the following areas:

• Request—Procurement—Delivery: processing requests from military units; approving purchase orders; managing invoices; accepting goods into the warehouse and issuing them to military units;
• Procurement: contract accounting; digital archive of original contracts; treasury; digital processing of receipts and payments;
• Receipt—Procurement: formation of Cash Flow for receipts and expenditures; accounting and reporting; human resources management; staffing; personnel records and payroll.

The project was implemented within 12 months, during which the IT-Enterprise team implemented a unified platform and ensured comprehensive management of business processes in compliance with the customer’s security requirements.

Project and area management

The Foundation runs numerous crowdfunding projects. These initiatives are aimed at saving the lives of Ukraine’s defenders and helping them win the war. An end-to-end business process has been implemented to manage receipts, procurement, and acceptance/delivery, which ensures:

• traceability at every stage (request-procurement-payment-delivery)
• control of the project and area when approving procurement
• automatic provision of financial analytics, automatic generation of Cash Flow reports by receipts and expenditures by project and area
• automatic creation of accounting entries for each project and area.

Another key functionality required for each initiative is creating comprehensive analytical reports in the system by the following categories:

• projects (Iron Support, Oko za Oko (‘Eye for an Eye’), Protect the Sky, Wings for Defence Intelligence, etc.)
• areas (FPV and bombers, aerial reconnaissance, sniping, communications, etc.)
• tags (weapons, generators, computers, optics, metal detectors, etc.).

Finance

The financial module was configured to automatically process bank statements for cash receipts: around 70,000 documents per month.

99.5% of all Bank Receipt Statements are processed automatically.

The Bank Receipt Statement process involves automatic identification of the project, Cash Flow line item, and creation of accounting entries. 

Automatic generation of the Cash Flow report for both receipts and expenses has ensured

85% less staff work on financial reporting

The module provides automatic processing of 1,000 bank statements for expenses per month, which is more than 10,000 items per month, and automatic generation of a procurement report to be displayed on the website.

The project team has built an end-to-end system of internal controls with automatic verification of the completeness and correctness of document data. Also, the system offers automatic posting of accounting entries.

Managing requests from military units 

The process for accepting and processing requests from military units has been centralized in a single workspace, the IT-Enterprise platform. This eliminated the need to use tools like Excel files or Google spreadsheets for requests or manually control their status. The platform has become a single tool for consolidating procurement requests, providing transparent control over the procurement status in a consolidated interface.

There is now a business process for auto-reserving goods during the registration of a military unit’s request and during the posting of goods, as well as saving the reservation while moving the goods. There is also a tool for quick distribution of reserves between orders. Another important feature is the ability to check the availability of signed issuance certificates and control of issued goods for which the certificate (act) has not yet been signed.

Procurement and warehouse management

Artificial intelligence helps with procurement and warehouse management, handling the routine processes of recognizing e-documents and converting them into structured system objects. This approach saves the team’s time as AI has automated the manual entry of tens of thousands of documents per month. After adding invoices automatically to the IT-Enterprise system, AI links them to the military unit’s requests and classifiers.

The Foundation’s processes and management operations have been centralized in one system for all departments: accounting, procurement, and warehouse. Duplicate data entry, typical of patchwork systems similar to the Foundation’s previous one, has been eliminated. This has improved data quality, speed of data entry, and accessibility.

The process for registering warehouse receipts based on orders has also been automated. The system ensures organized accounting for goods by serial numbers (cars, UAVs, radios, power supply units, night optics, etc.). Other completed tasks include revising the classifier of goods, eliminating duplicates, and creating description cards of the most frequently ordered goods.

HR management and payroll

The HR and Payroll module has enabled the Foundation to manage staffing tables for its charity and NGO activities. The system automatically calculates all final values of the timesheet: planned work time, actual work time, sick leave days, vacation days (paid time off), business trips, and unpaid time off. Accordingly, all payroll accruals based on the timesheet are also calculated automatically.

It is possible to add and edit conditional and permanent accruals/deductions for any timesheet item. Moreover, there is an automatic procedure for generating payroll statements with automatic data export to online banking.

Analytics and reports

The analytical module serves not only for management but also helps the Foundation build social responsibility. Now all reports on receipts, procurement, and delivery are automatically uploaded to the website. In case of any updates in previous periods, they are added without manual control.

Analytical dashboards for managing the Foundation's activities are available online and do not require manual reporting. The system generates real-time reports on receipts and expenses, procurement analysis, analytics on requests and issuances, and Cash Flow analytics.

Security module

Security is one of the top priorities in the Foundation’s business process management due to its industry specifics. The project team has implemented uniform rules to manage access to certain system features and ensure that all users undergo authorization before accessing the data. The change log helps to keep records of every user action, user data, change description and time, while security profiles block access to sensitive data.

“It is our great honor to cooperate with the Come Back Alive Foundation. We have used the most cutting-edge developments, experience and Industry 4.0 technologies to implement flexible and fast digital business processes. To facilitate routine operations, we have added AI whose job is to convert paper documents into structured and electronic ones on the fly directly on the IT-Enterprise platform. This is a game changer in work time optimization. Financial analytics on cash receipts, procurement, and reporting have been transformed into almost 100% automated functions and recognition of incoming and outgoing controllers. Today, all these technologies and business processes save the team's time, empowering it in its operations and intentions,” said Oleg Shcherbatenko, founder and CEO of IT-Enterprise.

IT-Enterprise is a digital partner of the Come Back Alive Foundation working to strengthen the Foundation's efficiency. In the future, the partners are looking to launch projects in general accounting, treasury, and financial accounting.