Cambridgeshire County Council is making savings of £200,000
a year after replacing its outdated financial systems with an
Oracle-based financial reporting system managed by Fujitsu
Services.
The council has been able to reduce its IT support costs and free
up financial and human resources staff from data entry tasks, a
report by Insead Business School has revealed.
The replacement of old back-office systems is a challenge facing
organisations in both the public and private sectors.
Cambridgeshire Council, which signed a £10m, eight-year outsourcing
deal with Fujitsu in 2002, has worked with the supplier to replace
IBM legacy systems used to manage council assets, property,
invoices, payroll and HR functions with Oracle's E-Business suite
running on Sun Unix servers.
Mike Parsons, the council's resources director, said, "The cost of
running our previous system was mounting. We had a number of
standalone systems running on an IBM mainframe. We had an old and
inflexible platform running old systems that needed heavy
maintenance."
As part of the upgrade, the council changed the way it managed
finances internally, moving from a decentralised paper-based
ordering and invoicing system to a web-based system, which lets
managers order from a list of approved suppliers.
The system keeps track of departmental budgets, providing managers
with accurate accounts which factor in the cost of orders that have
been placed but have yet to be paid. It has allowed the council to
meet government targets of paying all invoices within 30 days and
provides managers with up-to-the-minute financial reports, said
Parsons.
The system has also freed up staff time by eliminating the need for
re-keying of data between different databases.
HR staff have been able to use data collected by the system to run
a targeted information campaign which has reduced absenteeism among
council workers.
Cambridgeshire Council now plans to make further savings by
automating its paper-based expenses system.