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SunSystems Cloud Upgrade for Life & Peace Institute

Results at a Glance

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    Project completed in approximately 6 weeks
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    Only 3 working days of downtime during the final data migration to production
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    Accounting and infrastructure costs consolidated into a single cloud contract, with pricing locked for 3 years

About the Customer

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Location: Sweden
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Industry: Non-governmental organisation
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Employees: 55+
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Life & Peace Institute (LPI) is an international peacebuilding organisation founded in 1985. The Institute’s finance and administration function is spread across six offices, each supporting its own programme while coordinating on institute-wide financial matters.

LPI main donors include: Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida), European Union (EU), USAID/US Gov, United Nation Peacebuilding Fund, and Church of Sweden. Their work is driven by the desire to see a world where peace, justice, and non-violent relations prevail through people’s active work and commitment.

Challenge

LPI financial team relied on an on-premises Infor SunSystems 6.3 to manage their entities across six countries. The implemented version was moving to sustained maintenance with limited supportability and needed to be upgraded.

The existing setup was hosted privately by us, as we helped LPI in its implementation a few years earlier. LPI paid separately for the accounting solution and for infrastructure hosting and was looking for a way to consolidate their expenses.

Having six offices across Africa and Europe, our client wanted the new system to be easily accessible. At that time, reports were not stored locally and each user reached SunSystems and Q&A through a remote desktop connection. An extra layer meant that work was sometimes duplicated between local Excel files and the hosted system, adding a step to everyday reporting and creating room for error.

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Solution

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Our team migrated LPI from on-premises SunSystems 6.3 and Q&A 10 to SunSystems Cloud and Q&A 12. Because the two teams had already worked together, the project moved fast and was completed in six weeks.

To protect business continuity during the project, our team used temporary servers for a staging environment. LPI continued working in its existing 6.3 system, while FinanSys carried out an initial data migration to the temporary servers and ran user acceptance testing there.

Once testing was complete, we ran a final data migration. We combined data from the temporary servers with the newly accumulated data in 6.3, moving both into the live SunSystems Cloud environment. This final migration took three working days, during which LPI stayed off both systems to avoid duplicating or corrupting data.

When preparing data, we found older Q&A reports that followed unfamiliar conventions from an earlier subcontractor. The teams approached them collaboratively: we assisted the LPI team by showing them how to convert the reports during the training sessions and the finance team continued working on it. That training, and the client’s strong availability during testing, allowed us to complete the project ahead of schedule.

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Moving to SunSystems Cloud simplified our day-to-day more than we expected – having SUN in the browser and Q&A right in Excel cut out a step we didn't realise was slowing us down. The project itself ran smoothly thanks to clear communication from the FinanSys team, and it's built on years of support we've come to rely on.

– Paul Gustafsson, Audit & Compliance Manager, Life & Peace Institute
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Business Value

LPI now accesses SunSystems and Q&A through a browser, with no local desktop installation. Excel and the Q&A add-in sync directly to the cloud environment, removing the extra step and the risk of duplicating the same report across systems.

The move to SunSystems Cloud also consolidated the accounting solution and infrastructure hosting into a single contract, with pricing locked for three years. For a cost-conscious charity, this replaced a variable cost base with one predictable annual budget line.

The cloud upgrade also brought access to new capabilities, such as native dashboards and new feature releases every six months, included at no additional cost.

The migration to SunSystems Cloud gave LPI a solid foundation for future system updates. FinanSys and LPI are discussing a second project phase to explore new SunSystems capabilities and UniFi – our workflow automation solution.

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