OREANDA-NEWS. November 01, 2011.The Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland’s new SAP solution, provided by Fujitsu Finland, incorporates the financial administration of all parishes in Finland. The agreement covers a period of seven years and is worth 5.1 million euros.

The office of the Church Council has set up a national service centre, which will take care of the bookkeeping and payroll services for Finnish parishes. Fujitsu will provide the centre with a SAP application service, used by the service centre in the bookkeeping of all church finance units. The parishes will become service centre clients in phases during 2012–2017.

To begin with, the service centre will operate in Oulu and later expand to three other regional offices as the project advances. By 2017, the national service centre will accrue approximately seven million euros annual savings for the church in bookkeeping and payroll operating costs.

"This is a demanding multi-vendor project, and we needed a sufficiently experienced partner for it. In the competitive bidding, Fujitsu’s offer got the best points for the quality of the project plan, experience of project personnel, price, and for how well the solution met the operational demands,” says customer service manager Anne Saloniemi from Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland.

The office of the Church Council started the application project to secure the functioning of parish financial administration in the future. As much as 35% of the church finance administration personnel will retire by the year 2017.

Fujitsu’s core solution includes bookkeeping, management accounting, general billing, as well as accounts payable and receivable. Solutions like payroll, expense reports, payment transactions, and portal solutions are provided by other partners; Fujitsu is in charge of coordinating the projects for these solutions.