Department of Software Engineering

Bahria University Islamabad Campus

Assignment-3
CLO-2

Course Title: Management Information Systems

INSTRUCTIONS:
A) Individual Assignment. Everyone must write their own answers. You may consult each other
though.
B) Both Hard and Soft copies to be submitted.
C) For Soft copy:
a. To be submitted in MS-Word format.
b. It is to be submitted on Turnitin Account for the course. Create an account if you do not
have one, and enroll for the course on it. Enrollment key can be collected from the
teacher.
D) Use the Cover Sheet provided at the end of the Assignment. Assignments without this cover
sheet will not be accepted.

Read the following Case Study and answer the questions below.

QUESTIONS:
1. Describe the problem faced by Plan International. What management, organization, and
technology factors contributed to this problem?
2. Describe the system solution to this problem. Describe the types of systems used for the
solution.

Plan International
Founded in 1937, Plan International is one of the oldest and largest children’s development
organizations in the world, promoting rights and opportunities for children in need. With global
headquarters in Surrey, UK, the organization has operations in more than 70 countries (including 51
developing nations in Africa, Asia, and the Americas), and worked with 81.5 million children in more
than 86,676 communities in 2014. Plan International has grown steadily over the years and has more
than 1,200 paid staff members and more than 9,000 volunteers.

Plan International is not affiliated with any religious or political group or government. It
obtains about half of its funding from donations from corporations, governments, and trusts and the
rest from individuals willing to sponsor a child.

Plan International works with children, families, communities, and local governments to
bring about positive change for children in health, education, water and sanitation, protection,
economic security, and coping with catastrophes such as wars, floods, earthquakes, and other
natural disasters. For example, Plan has sent workers to help children affected by the 2013 Typhoon
Haiyan in the Philippines and the Ebola virus outbreak in West Africa. In addition to coordinating
emergency response efforts, Plan runs public health information campaigns and trains health and
aid workers.

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 Plan’s objective is to reach as many disadvantaged children as possible, and this requires a
highly coordinated approach. When an emergency strikes, Plan must locate and deploy the most
appropriate resources wherever they are required. To accomplish this a disaster relief team at Plan’s
head office must sift through data on all of its 10,000 aid workers in 70 countries to see which
people have the appropriate skills and experience in medical aid, child protection, education, and
shelter management to provide the necessary services. Typically, the people chosen to respond to a
specific emergency will have a variety of skills, including frontline workers with knowledge of the
language and the local area. Plan now has the ability see data about all of its workers’ skills the
moment an emergency occurs, so it can respond immediately with the right team of people.

Plan is now able to instantly assemble pertinent information about its workers because of its
new human resources (HR) systems. The human resources systems allow Plan to track not only the
skills people bring when they are hired but also any additional training or experience they have
acquired for disaster response emergencies while working for Plan.

The human resources systems also help Plan manage the grants and donations it receives.
When a donation first comes in, it is sent to Plan’s London headquarters and allocated from there. If,
for example, Plan receives a $40 million grant to use in Sierra Leone, Plan will need different people
to manage that grant for Plan. Plan needs to be able to scan the organization globally to find the
right people.

Before the new human resources systems were implemented, Plan was working with very
outdated decentralized systems that were partially manual. The organization had to keep track of
employees using a patchwork of 30 different human resources systems, spreadsheets, and
documents.

It could take weeks to locate people with the right language skills, disaster experience, and
medical training. When a massive earthquake struck Haiti in 2010, Plan had to email everyone asking
if staff knew any people who could speak French, had the appropriate disaster management skills,
and were available to help.

In 2012 Plan began looking for a human resources system that could handle its growing
global workforce, support common processes across all regions, and deliver information on a secure
mobile platform in regions where technology infrastructure was not well developed. The
organization selected a cloud based HR system from SAP’s SuccessFactors as well as on-premises
software from SAP, which satisfied these requirements and are integrated with one another.
Implementation of the new system began in May 2013. It took only 16 weeks to implement a fully
working system at Plan’s international headquarters, and all of Plan’s international regions were
brought onto the system by 2014.

The cloud-based SuccessFactors system runs in remote computer centers managed by

SuccessFactors and is accessible to users via the Internet. The system provides a centralized
employee profile with a comprehensive view of employee skill sets, expertise, experience, and
career interests. Through an intuitive interface, employees can update their own information,
creating an easily searchable directory that every employee can access. Plan uses SuccessFactors
software modules for recruiting, performance and goals, succession and development,
compensation, and learning. Plan also implemented SuccessFactors Workforce Planning and on-
premises SAP Personnel Administration and Organization Management software. Workforce
planning entails systematic identification and analysis of what an organization is going to need in
terms of the size, type, experience, knowledge, skills, and quality of its workforce to achieve its
business objectives. SAP’s Personnel Administration software manages employee recordkeeping and

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organizational data concerning the recruitment, selection, retention, development, and assessment
of personnel. SAP’s Organization Management software enables organizations to depict and analyze
their organizational and reporting structures.

The new human resources systems provide a bird’s-eye view of the entire Plan workforce,
showing immediately how many people work for Plan, where they are located, what skills they
possess, their job responsibilities, and their career paths. Plan’s central human resources staff spend
much less time chasing information. For example, assembling and analyzing data from employee
performance reviews, including performance-based salary calculations, used to take up to six
months. Now all it takes is the push of a button. Employees are able to access their human resources
records online and update information such as address, family details, and emergency contacts. By
enabling employees to perform these tasks themselves, Plan saves valuable human resources staff
time, which can be directed toward more value-adding work. Plan is also able to show its donors
exactly how their contributions were spent and the results.

Using SuccessFactors and SAP human resources software, Plan staff are able to identify and
dispatch relief workers to disaster areas within hours. When Typhoon Haiyan struck the Philippines
in November 2013, Plan specialists were on the scene within 72 hours. Being able to deploy staff to
emergencies so rapidly has saved more lives. What’s more, Plan’s improved response time has
helped it secure new sources of funding by giving it more credibility with governments, corporations,
and other sources of grants and donations.

Sources: Lauren Bonneau, “Customer Snapshot: Changing Lives and Creating Self-Sufficient
Communities—One Child at a Time,” www.sap.com , accessed March 10, 2016; “Better Planning for
Plan International: The Life-Saving Power of Improved Data Visibility,” SAP Insider Profiles, January 1,
2015; and www.plan-international.org , accessed March 10, 2016.

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 Management Information Systems
ASSIGNMENT-3
BSE-6A
ENROLLMENT #:

NAME:
(IN CAPITAL LETTERS)

DUE DATE: 17 May 2019

DATE SUBMITTED:

Q-1 Q-2

GRADE:

ANSWER-1
Write your answers to first question here.

No restriction on number of words.

ANSWER-2:
Write answer to second question here.

No restriction on number of words.