Umoja - A Year in Review

During 2016, Umoja built on many past accomplishments, and reached new milestones. Over the past year, Umoja was deployed to national staff and individual uniformed personnel in special political missions and peacekeeping operations (cluster 5), bringing the number of Umoja users around the globe to 42,000 staff at 400 locations worldwide, with 47,056 personnel being payrolled per month, including Uniformed Personnel. For the first time, the entire Secretariat has a single, modern administrative solution that enables the management of the Organization’s resources. 

Additionally, important functionality like Financial Statements Vol II, Service Delivery for special political missions and peacekeeping organizations, two phases of the GA mandated changes to ICSC compensation package as well as Preventive Maintenance -the first Umoja Extension 2 project to go live- and Business-to-Business (B2B) inbound/outbound invoicing were rolled out earlier this year.

The impact of these new functions is already tangible. In just one month after the implementation of the B2B inbound invoice interface from Office Depot, 364 invoices were electronically processed in Umoja. This represents a significant shift in workload which, without such interface, would have been manually processed by the Vendor Claims Team. PKOs and SPMs now have the needed Service Delivery functionality, which allows UN departments, offices and missions that provide services to internal and external clients to manage the costs and billings for their services. Furthermore, a bank automation initiative was unveiled earlier this year, resulting in nearly 99% of automatic reconciliations for over 30,000 payments per month. 

The intricacies of rolling out a system-wide approach have yielded an unprecedented level of collaboration, and the journey is far from over.  Looking ahead, the implementation of UE2 will take effect in 2017-2018, adding many new processes to the Umoja suite. 

Some of the UE2 projects include: Budget Formulation, additional processes in Supply Chain Management, Implementing Partners, Fundraising and Donor Relationship Management, Conference and Event Management, Force Management as well as the remaining implementation of the ICSC compensation package, SAP upgrades and continuous improvement initiatives. 

Umoja is one of the most important business transformations in the history of the United Nations. Through robust partnerships within the Secretariat, the Organization is starting to reap the benefits of Umoja. Collective efforts and continued collaboration will allow us to achieve the full potential of this organizational change initiative.