Council hopes to save £50m by streamlining

Surrey County Council hopes to generate savings of £50m from a multimillion pound business transformation project.

The C21 Business (C21B) programme underpins the local authority's 'People First' strategy to streamline business processes and free up resources to invest in frontline services. It will consolidate fragmented and obsolete technology and re-design internal procedures based on best practice.

Over the next two years the council, in partnership with IBM, will be implementing mySAP enterprise resource planning (ERP) software and setting up a shared service centre to handle key transactions.

The main areas to benefit from the new systems will be payroll, human resources (HR), finance and purchasing. The council expects to see a return on investment in the first three to five years of the 10-year partnership.

At the moment Surrey has multiple finance systems and paper-based HR procedures, says David Rees, IT stream leader for the project.

'We have fragmented systems all over the county and information in those systems is often keyed in many times and sometimes it is either inaccurate or conflicts with data in other systems doing the same sort of job,' he said.

'We also have managers requiring access to quite complex data, because of the size of the organisation, and it is quite an overhead to deliver that.'

Multiple legacy systems are expensive to run and need a lot of staff to maintain, says Rees.

'The ERP system will eliminate duplication, streamline processes and increase the council's responsiveness to change, leading to better service to our customers,' he said.

'It is very much a business transformation project which means using IT to change the culture to do things smarter, better, more cost effectively.'

The team will be working on the blueprints until January when a roadmap for implementation and roll out will be produced.