Birmingham City Council, Europe's
largest local authority, has been left with a backlog of more than
18,000 unpaid invoices after an
SAP-based system ran into difficulties.
Bailiffs have visited the council, some suppliers have withdrawn
goods and services, and staff say workers have been forced to use
their own money to buy food for a children's care home.
The council's IT transformation programme, which included the
SAP project, was among the winners of the
Cabinet Office's
E-Government Awards. Gordon Brown praised the awards winners
last month.
Glyn Evans, lead for the council's IT transformation programme,
said, "Some individual suppliers have gone through some pain. I
regret that."
The council ran into difficulties after the project went live
last October. Problems included the partial failure of the
automatic installation of SAP software on about 5,000 PCs. This
meant software specialists had to visit each machine and load the
software manually.
The delays left staff who were without SAP unable to pay
invoices. When some business users called the helpdesk, they were
unable to obtain assistance for 48 hours.
The council's joint IT venture with Capita, Service Birmingham,
which supplied the SAP system, has brought in extra staff to clear
the backlog of invoices. The council concedes that the cost of
sorting out the problems will reduce the profits of Service
Birmingham.
Council officers expected teething problems when the SAP
financial system went live on 29 October last year. But Evans said
the council had expected the backlog to have been cleared by
December 2007. Now they expect to clear it by the end of this
month.
The backlog needs to be put into the context of the scale of
Birmingham City Council's operations, he said. It has a turnover of
£3bn, pays £1bn a year for goods and services and settles 700,000
invoices annually. Evans said he was aware of bailiffs being called
to only one site.
He said the SAP-based Voyager system has paid 216,000 invoices
successfully to about 20,000 suppliers. Voyager is one of nine
major transformation programmes within the council. The council
hopes the whole programme will save £1bn over 10 years.
Birmingham MP John Hemming defended the system by writing to a
local blogger, The
Stirrer, after council staff used a forum on the website to
complain about Voyager.
He said, "There is a backlog which is being cleared." He added
that bailiffs only visited one council site after a supplier's bill
was only "three days late".
Birmingham Council’s SAP implementation – what went
wrong
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