Updated Southwest England’s Dorset Council is preparing to swap its legacy SAP ERP for an Oracle-built replacement in a project set to cost £14.2 million over three years.
According to an official notice published last week, the £417.2 million-budget unitary authority has signed a £7 million contract with Oracle “for the purchase of an Enterprise Resource Planning solution to complete core HR, payroll, finance, and procurement processes.”
Although the council did not name the specific Oracle product, it has published a job ad for an ERP transformation program director “to lead the implementation of Oracle Fusion,” a cloud-based system. The salary is “negotiable,” it says.
In February, the council published an outline business case from public sector consultancy Socitm, which said its current ERP solution is based on SAP ECC6 and supports core functions of finance, human resources, source-to-pay, and payroll, which Dorset County Council put in place in 2009. It continued to use the system after it became a unitary authority as Dorset Council in 2019. Mainstream support ends in 2027, although options for extended and third-party support are available.
“There is a recognition that the current platform is no longer fit for purpose, with the following drivers for change being identified through engagement with Council stakeholders,” the paper said [PDF].
What’s more, the council has spent years getting the SAP system to fit its needs, but in time it became less than ideal.
“The current solution has been highly customized to meet the needs of professional back-office teams and end users. The customizations have led to the higher workloads, just to ‘keep the lights on.’ The technology is not intuitive or cost effective and requires a high level of maintenance. The current solution and business processes are noted by the council as being clunky, outdated, and non-intuitive. The user experience is inconsistent, with many processes being managed manually ‘offline,'” the report said.
The council has kept the full business case and the discussion of its decision to adopt Oracle from the public domain.
However, a report [PDF] on the related council transformation plan published in October said the total cost of the project, including licensing and IT services, would be £14.23 million over three years. The ERP system is set to be introduced alongside a new contact center and automation technologies.
The document said the “implementation of ERP is closely aligned with our future ways of working across all council services, supporting our ambition to deliver modern, efficient, and customer-focused public services.”
The council said it expects to go live with Oracle Fusion in late 2027. Both Birmingham City Council and West Sussex County Council have struggled in moving their ERP from SAP to Oracle, with each experiencing massive cost overruns and implementation delays.
Birmingham, in particular, foundered on trying to adapt Oracle to its processes, and is now trying to reimplement the standard system while also buying third-party software.
The Register has asked Dorset Council to comment. ®
Updated to add at 1333 UTC, December 1
A spokesperson for Dorset Council said Oracle was the best value outcome from its procurement process, which it did not disclose publicly.
“The decision… reflected that systems such as an ERP platform are once in a generation investments. The SAP solution currently operated by the council is old technology, providing an outdated (inefficient) user experience and hinders opportunities to re-imagine how we work to streamline work activities through adopting modern industry best practices and adopting automation and AI,” they said.
“At the very core of our implementation is a determination to adopt standard Oracle best practice, rather than try to bend the solution to fit a more unique ‘Dorset’ way of working – this was a critical contributing factor to the well-publicized issues Birmingham City Council faced when implementing Oracle Cloud a couple of years ago. With this in mind, during the ‘blueprinting’ design phase of the implementation we will understand how Oracle best practice delivers in scope work processes, with the mindset that we will adopt those ways of working and focus critically through the implementation on change management to support colleagues to work in different ways in the future.”
