The User Organizations

The SunPlus User Organizations fall into five different categories.  They are group in the following ways mostly because of the unique financial reporting challenges and may not be grouped this way in normal Adventist parlance.

Administrative Organizations

This category includes the GC, Divisions, Unions and Local Fields.  And while there are great differences in, say, the GC compared to a Mission in South-East Asia, in most cases the differences are primarily in volume of transactions and size.  But the accounting system challenges are very similar.

SunPlus are usually brand new and the Division SunPlus teams are racing to get the new Unions onboard.

Union Level Usage

TED has about one-half of their Unions on the software: The British Union, Baltic Union, Hungarian Union, Southeast European, and Adriatic.  Since the Software comes from the UK, it is easy to see why the British Union were quick to take it on.  Otherwise in the Division, the countries in the emerging economies were more likely to take it on.  The Northern Unions in the division (Norway, Sweden, Finland, Danish, Netherland Unions) assert that their countries prescribe which software they must use.

SUD, with only one of its Unions using the software, has just started implementing SunPlus in their field and SPD, with only half of its unions on the software, has decided to only use the software in Australia. It does have the Papua New Guinea union on the software.

The following are using SunPlus in substantially all of their Unions: ECD, ESD, IAD, NSD, SSD, and WAD.  In these Divisions, any Unions missing

Local Field Usage

The same divisions that have nearly all their Unions on the software also are fairly close to having all of their Conferences and Mission on the software.  NSD and IAD are substantially at 100%. With SSD (76%), ECD (66%), SID (76%), WAD (73%), hurrying to catch up.  Again one of biggest reason this is not at 100% is the creation of new local fields.

Educational Organizations

A summary recap of usage rates of the SunPlus software in the denomination’s educational organizations follows this introduction:

Colleges and Universities

A pleasant surprise of the SunPlus project is how useful the software in helping with the financial management to of the denominations Colleges and Universities.

Several Divisions have used it at 100% of their post-secondary institutions: ECD, SSD, TED and WAD.  These divisions followed a strategy of implementing their Colleges and Universities in tandem with their administrative units.

Other divisions set their administrative units as a priority and have more recently focused on their educational institutions: IAD, ESD
Two Divisions have showed no interest in using it this way: SPD and NSD. SUD is just getting started.  Given the nature of higher education in that Division, the SunPlus project may be very useful in addressing the needs there.

Here are a sample list of the Post Secondary Institutes who are using SunPlus:

Secondary Schools

Secondary schools are emerging as an important priority in the SunPlus Network.  A notable example is ECD with 79% of their Secondary Schools in the system.

One remarkable development is happening on the Island of the Dominican Republic.  Recently 100+ elementary and high schools were brought into the SunPlus system by use of a centralized accounting center.  Accounting Centers will be discussed more fully later. But in short, the accountants for all of the schools are centralized and simply provide accounting reports to the leadership of the school.

There is still a lot of work to be done in this area.

Other Organizations

The divisions in Africa have made a special effort to start using SunPlus to help with their financial management in their hospitals.  Here are the percentages of hospitals implemented in Africa: ECD (100%), SID (70%), and WAD (77%). IAD (18%), SSD (35%) and SUD (0%) have just begun their efforts in this regard.

The other Sunplus Divisions SPD, TED, ESD have very few hospitals so they have, understandably, not put any efforts in this direction.

Below is a list of medical organizations using SunPlus:

Publishing Houses

Several Divisions have focused on implementing SunPlus in their publishing houses.  ECD, IAD, and WAD have all of their publishing houses using the software.

SID (40%)  and SSD (33%) are making some progress in this area.

The software, as originally purchased, did not include an inventory module.  To remedy this, recently the General Conference has purchased some inventory modules to close this gap.  This will make it much more reasonable to use the software in publishing houses.

In addition to this, a special publishing house job cost accounting system has been configured to work closely with the software to help improve this area.  It is now operating in the Advent Press publishing house in Accra, Ghana and will be rolled out throughout the denomination after testing.

ADRA

The SunSystems accounting software is being used by some very notable international development agencies like ADRA.

Currently their focus and urgent need is in the grant recipient countries of Asia, Africa and the Middle East.  In Africa they have 32 ADRA Offices 17 (53%) are now using the software to track their grants.  ADRA Asia has 16 offices.  Eleven (69%) are using the SunSystem software.  For the Middle East it is 3 (38%) of the 8 ADRA offices. In addition ADRA England is using the software.