Western Union connects people and businesses around the globe by providing fast, reliable and convenient ways to move money. The company’s 160-year history and more than 500,000 Western Union Agent locations in more than 200 countries and territories strengthen its commitment to offering services in every corner of the globe. Western Union also takes pride in being close to its customers. Together with its agents and more than 10,000 employees, they strive to speak the language of its customers, live in their neighborhoods and share in their cultures.
In addition to providing fast and reliable ways to move money across the globe, Western Union also strives to be a leader in corporate citizenship. As a result, the company identified three systemic problems that plagued non-governmental organization (NGO) relief efforts in the aftermath of a humanitarian crisis. They included:
· The inability to rapidly deliver donations during a crisis vs. weeks or months after
· Difficulty in sending donations to areas with limited or no banking systems
· The fact that donations typically pass through multiple intermediaries on their way to victims
These problems were summarized by the Clinton Global Initiative, stating: “We need help sending money where it’s needed most, when it’s needed most.” It was both a profound opportunity and obligation that Western Union’s CEO Hikmet Ersek immediately accepted on behalf of his global team with three words: “We can help.” Within days of Ersek’s bold pledge, Western Union’s VP of Global Strategy Chris Trujillo was tasked to build a solution framework.
Western Union realized they had all the ingredients to solve the problem, but there was no recipe to pull it together. They realized it was essential to take their legacy systems, integrate them to a newly acquired business, find a way to tie technology & teams together and build that solution on a global stage. That solution would aim to solve and overcome 4 key challenges:
-Identify and mobilize the “best and brightest” resources from a global roster of staff
-Seamlessly coordinate and conduct planning on a global scale
-Effectively collaborate and communicate with offices and teams around the world -Access real-time visibility, so that its teams could report back to the CEO, who in turn could keep former President Clinton updated on progress
Western Union selected Clarizen’s collaborative work management software because they recognized it could intertwine all of the key aspects needed to achieve its goals, while delivering it seamlessly and via the cloud.
Clarizen’s collaborative work management software played a large role in helping Trujillo and his team overcome these challenges and ultimately create a transformative product that had the potential to improve millions of lives.
First, to mobilize globally dispersed resources, Trujillo and his team used Clarizen to build segmented holistic portfolio views by region. This allowed them to clearly see what projects needed to be paused, cancelled or reprioritized across the global portfolio. They also gained unprecedented visibility at both the project and task levels, in order to identify key resources (i.e. “the best and the brightest”) and allocate/re-allocate them accordingly.
In terms of project and program management, Trujillo and his team also used Clarizen to create cross-functional programs that synchronized projects seamlessly, yet were managed independently. This delivered a clear, accurate and complete view of what was happening with the overall program, and all of its individual projects.
And with respect to communication and collaboration, Trujillo and his team connected globally dispersed stakeholders by automatically attaching all communications to specific work packages, and by using Clarizen’s scorecard functionality to establish consistent messaging between cross-functional departments and across regions. Stakeholders were also given a dynamic link to share project plans, issues and communications in real-time.
With the dramatic change and increase in operational efficiency, Western Union was able to create and launch its truly transformative product “NGO GlobalPay faster than it had ever anticipated. Before implementing Clarizen, the team would spend hours pulling reports and creating report cards to provide updates to the executive team. By automating that process, the team can now provide consistent and effective messaging to global sponsors with a template that captures all the information within seconds.
Additionally, Western Union purges emails every 60 days, but Clarizen provided them the chance to save those communications and easily locate them. Says Trujillo: “The days of sending an email or .pdf are over. Once that information leaves your mailbox it’s dated. Clarizen allowed us to give our stakeholders a comprehensive view with real-time and refreshed data.”
On top of all this, Western Union can now monitor revenue generating projects by life cycle stages and in real-time, so that at-risk projects can be brought back on track and restored to health. Says Trujillo: “We didn’t have to spend time and resources configuring the system to get this required level of visibility. This was out-of-the-box in Clarizen.”
Collaborative work management software from global leader Clarizen.
The above-noted improvements and achievements were critical to helping Western Union create its truly transformative product “NGO GlobalPay.” However, as Trujillo notes, “the ultimate question was whether we fulfilled our CEO’s promise to help send money where it’s needed most, when it’s needed most.”
That question has been definitively answered in light of the astonishing, life-changing results that NGO GlobalPay has driven since it launched in 2012:
· Enabling more than 700 NGO’s send $2.3 billion around the world
· Helping more than 70 million people gain access to capital and financial services
· Directly impacting the lives of over 50,000 people
· Enabling cash disbursement capabilities to 187 countries
· Extending mobile disbursement in key regions
· Launching a partnership with omnichannel fundraising platform provider Kimbia Inc. to help NGOs meet their fundraising and distribution goals internationally
Here is a link to a video that captures the results of this moving and critical project:
Reflects Trujillo, whose leadership on this essential program earned him a promotion from Director to VP of Global Strategy, and also helped him win the Most Dramatic Career Growth from Using Clarizen Milestone Award at the Clarizen@Work 2015 Conference: “Clarizen was instrumental in helping us deliver a global product to market that has already impacted thousands of lives around the world – and is poised to impact millions more in the future.”
