How TimeXtender Technology Helps Covid-19 Global Effort

A few years back, TimeXtender technology was implemented at Direct Relief, a humanitarian aid non-profit organization that helps improve the health and lives of people affected by poverty or emergencies. The organization does such great charitable work that it was ranked #1 on Charity Navigator’s list of the ten best charities in the U.S.

To accomplish its global humanitarian efforts, Direct Relief relies heavily on data, analysis, and reporting. Its use of information has grown exponentially as the organization’s role in the world has expanded.

Today, Direct Relief is working very hard and providing great assistance to help with the worldwide Covid-19 pandemic. To this end, TimeXtender continues to play an important role in helping Direct Relief manage and consolidate its organizational data, which have helped secure faster updates about operations such as supplies being shipped and delivered.

TimeXtender got involved with helping Direct Relief after the organization began using Qlik. This data management platform enabled Direct Relief to improve its analysis and to report and show stakeholders the status of its humanitarian activities. While Qlik gave Direct Relief’s visibility into its data unlike ever before, the organization’s lack of a data warehouse and a comprehensive data model made data sourcing a challenge. The data resided in several locations including SAP data, donor and fundraising records, Excel spreadsheets, and various other sources.

TimeXtender leveraged the power of automation to build an end-to-end data warehouse and business intelligence solution that provided new levels of performance and agility in data sourcing.

“Once we installed Qlik, we were able to work with data in ways that weren’t possible before. However, a lot of the data was hard to access,” said Dawn Long, senior vice president and COO at Direct Relief. “We knew we needed a better way to organize and standardize our data. Then, we discovered TimeXtender.”

Long also mentioned that TimeXtender’s technology approach helped them organize and build a better data model that provided quality, validation and transparency.

For Direct Relief, the first step was data modeling: understanding the data sources and streamlining naming conventions. Next came the building of the data warehouse and the collection of all common data. With data well organized, sourced, and maintained in TimeXtender, new data sources could be rapidly added.

“With TimeXtender, we were able to look at our data and immediately organize it all with common names that ensured all our systems were talking to each other. We built a model to bring together all our data sources, programs, products, and events. This allows us to run multiple applications on one platform and retrieve the information we need with one click,” said Long.

To see more about how TimeXtender helping Direct Relief, watch this video on the TimeXtender YouTube channel or here for the entire success story.