The brand new mayor of Birmingham Metropolis Council has instructed native newspapers of a dramatic value enhance in a significant enterprise useful resource planning (ERP) upgrade venture.
In an interview given to Birmingham Put up Workplacemetropolis councilor John Cotton has described the “disastrous” Oracle system which has left taxpayers with a £100m invoice.
Whereas particulars of the problems dealing with the council haven’t been launched, the IT issues stemmed from an formidable upgrade of the SAP system the council has run since 1999. The Council acknowledged that vital assets could be required to get to some extent the place the system might be absolutely applied. “We estimate that the ultimate value of this shall be round £80m to £100m,” the council instructed Computer Weekly. “It would final over three years.”
In 2006, Birmingham Metropolis Council signed a strategic settlement with SAP, Capita and Axon, which on the time was the most important native authorities IT transformation venture in Europe.
Final 12 months, Peter Bishop, director of digital and buyer providers at Birmingham Metropolis Council, mentioned an implementation that concerned shifting from town’s SAP ERP to Oracle.
In a webinar posted on YouTube, he described the SAP-based platform that Oracle is changing as unable to satisfy buyer challenges. “It is not intuitive; it is a very dangerous consumer expertise,” Bishop mentioned. “We rely too closely on energy customers to extract and handle info.”
This SAP-based platform has been utilized by the council since 1999. “We invested closely in it as a part of our strategic partnership fashioned in 2006, which ended in 2019,” he mentioned, including that the previous system supported a variety of enterprise processes in human assets, finance and procurement that had been considerably configured It additionally dealt with £700m of payroll a 12 months, processed 26,000 fee particulars, processed invoices and provider receipts and built-in with 140 different council programs. Within the video, Bishop mentioned that the totally different modules do not talk with one another, which was one of many causes for the transfer to the brand new platform.
In 2017, Bishop mentioned Birmingham Metropolis Council had ready an financial case for switching to the brand new system. Talking in regards to the complexity of migration, he mentioned: “Information migration is a selected problem. You will have a lot information that is been so fastidiously arrange, and all of the feed programs are each inbound and outbound.” In keeping with him, this can be a critical problem.
In the course of the webinar, Bishop mentioned he was assured the council would meet the April 2022 deadline, though the ERP upgrade would require a significant information migration venture. “It may nonetheless go flawed,” he mentioned. “We’re all crossing our fingers and we’ve got an excellent course of and a set of companions who know what they’re doing.”
The board mentioned it’s presently working at an acceptable tempo and has developed a plan that originally focuses on stabilizing the state of affairs and optimizing Oracle’s implementation.
“Whereas this additional funding is important, the correct functioning of Oracle and its function in monetary and other people administration is crucial for a company the dimensions of Birmingham Metropolis Council, with a gross income budget of £3.4 billion a 12 months,” the council mentioned.
