Background
Surrey County Council were looking to undertake a major upgrade to their ERP system to help meet the future objectives of the Council.
Moore Insight were engaged at the start of this journey to help advise on strategic options and build a financial model to support the business case.
Following business case approval Moore Insight were further engaged to produce requirements, a specification and provide support to the procurement process.
The Solution
Strategic Options
Moore Insight worked closely with directors across the key business functions utilising the system (Finance, HR, Procurement and Payroll) to determine outline requirements and the future strategic direction that they wanted to take.
Four key options (including upgrades, re-implementations, alternative tier one and two solutions and cloud or in-house) were considered against the Financial, Qualitative Improvements and Business Disruption in order to determine the future direction.
Business Case
Having presented the strategic options to the programme board the next stage involved preparing a business base financial model. Working with Finance and IT and utilising Moore Insight’s experience in ERP projects a detailed financial model was built, including internal and external resourcing and indicative hardware and licensing.
Specifications
Building on previous work that Moore Insight had undertaken with the Council we were able to validate their business requirements quickly and efficiently across Finance, HR, Procurement and Payroll.
A series of informal workshops were held with key business users from the functions where the known requirements were played back, amended and added to in order to have a current and forward-looking set of requirements.
Once agreed, the requirements formed the basis of the functional and non-functional specification.
Procurement Support
Working in conjunction with the Programme and the Council’s procurement function, Moore Insight provided specialist input into the procurement process, including determining the evaluation criteria, building an evaluation matrix, creating agendas for supplier presentations and facilitating supplier presentations and moderation sessions.
During this phase Moore Insight also provided ad-hoc advice to the Council on future stages of the programme, including data migration, cutover and archiving.
The Challenge
The key challenges relating to this project were the challenging time scales to migrate away from the existing system, as the supplier was removing support, hardware would require a significant upgrade and to avoid additional ongoing maintenance costs.
Moore Insight helped to expedite the process with a rapid turnaround of deliverables and with the ability to utilise existing documentation to speed up the requirements gathering process.
Additional challenges came from the impact of COVID-19 which meant that key phases that would traditionally be delivered face to face were not possible. Moore Insight were able to work remotely using the latest technologies and enabled supplier presentations to be fully delivered through video conferencing.
The Outcome
The Council has successfully completed a full OJEU procurement process and awarded the contract for a new ERP system. Moore Insight’s input helped to expedite the process through quick delivery and experience. Their detailed knowledge and understanding of the ERP market and the Local Government sector helped the Programme determine a solution that would meet their future requirements.
Testimonial
“The team at Moore Insight provided high-quality support to Surrey County Council throughout the business case, requirements and selection of our new ERP system. Their knowledge of the systems market allowed us to better understand the options available, develop our requirements and efficiently procure a system that would meet our financial and business objectives. We are very pleased with the support we received that established a solid foundation for the project and are looking forward to implementing our new system.”
Surrey County Council (2021)