Oracle lands London Council deal for £12m ERP Project

A few months after the London Borough of Bromley announced that they were moving their financial systems to Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) the London Borough of Waltham Forest has also followed suit. The contract to implement their new ERP system was awarded to Oracle and systems integrator Evosys in a project that has an estimated capital expenditure of £12 million over three years. At this time, we can’t tell how much of the £12 million will go towards financing Oracle licences.

Waltham Forest council, through the Business Case document, noted that the new cloud-based system will replace a legacy SAP product that has been operational since 2003 but is no longer viable.

"The Council's current version of SAP has performance issues and poor usability increases manual work for employees," the document read.

According to the document, the SAP system could not be relied on and in a number of instances, transactions had to be processed off-system.

The council further notes that upgrading the SAP system was an option but was determined to be too expensive requiring more effort than the alternative.

A vigorous market scanning exercise by the council yielded 8 potential candidates for the project. They all presented their system to the council which then settled with Oracle based on positive feedback from service leads.

With this new solution, the council will integrate all their finance, HR, and Procurement processes into the cloud leading to a better employee experience and improved service delivery to the over 250,000 residents that they serve.

"By connecting our critical departments through a single unified platform, we can streamline and set up easy-to-follow processes across the business and enable access to more accurate and up-to-date data. We want to invest in a solution that will evolve and adapt with our business and after recommendations from our peers, we know Oracle Fusion Applications is the best fit for us." Councillor Paul Douglas said in a press release.

Now that a deal has been agreed upon, the system’s design phase can begin. Waltham Forest council estimates that the system will officially go live in Spring 2023 and that the project will be over by summer 2024.