Lessons learned rolling out cloud-based ERP at Southampton City Council

Over the years, Southampton City Council's IT estate had grown a little unkempt and disjointed. In common with many complex, highly connected organisations, it had accrued multiple point solutions and bolt-ons and these were becoming expensive and hard to manage. Moreover, the council was under intense pressure to cut costs wherever possible.

Thanks to clarity brought by GDPR - and to the cloud providers' response to that legislation - cloud is no longer the no-no it once was for the public sector, and Southampton has a cloud-first policy, which is helping it to rationalise its systems.

"Our in-house data centre has reduced quite significantly over the years as we virtualised, and as we move forward, next time there's a hardware refresh we'll be considering cloud as the alternative," explained Gavin Muncaster, head of IT at Southampton City Council.

"There's obviously a cost savings piece around not having our own hardware unnecessarily, and moving to cloud platforms will make working with other organisations easier. The other drivers for cloud are flexibility of connectivity and disaster recovery."

The Council had been reliant on on-premises accounting and HR solutions from Unit4 and payroll software from Northgate, but decided to consolidate all this functionality into one cloud-based application.

"We realised we could move onto an ERP system and get rid of some of the HR and other systems and start making some real cost savings within the authority," said Helen Baker, BusinessWorld manager.

So, in 2017 Southampton started rolling out Unit4 BusinessWorld (now known as Unit4 People Experience Suite) to bring HR, payroll and financials under a single roof. At around the same time, but not in tandem, Microsoft Azure cloud services were also procured through Unit4.

Because they need to span so many business processes, data sources and events, ERP rollouts are notorious for being among the most challenging IT interventions to get right, and a cursory look at the history of such projects will uncover the bones of dozens of expensive failures. Fortunately, Southampton City Council doesn't look set to join them. As anticipated, the rollout has been a challenge, said Baker, but it has generally progressed pretty much to plan. Indeed, the system has emerged from an early test with flying colours.

"Going through the Covid situation we had no problems with the new ERP, which was unfortunately not the case with some other areas. The one thing that's kept nice and stable was the ERP system, so we've been really lucky that it was in place," Baker explained.

That said, there are always lessons to be learned, she added.

Lessons learned

Make sure you've considered all the business processes

While going through the implementation the team realised they had not picked up all the business processes to be covered by the ERP, and had to incorporate them as they went along. The ERP spans many departments and functions, some of which were making changes of their own at the same time, so they could be excused for missing a few processes. Nevertheless, this was something the Baker felt they should have spent more time on, pre-rollout.

"I think the key to it is actually getting the planning right, and making sure that you've got everything up front done," added Muncaster. "And sometimes that's really difficult to do, not just in local authorities but anywhere I guess, especially when you've got a forever changing environment."

Loss of configurability was not such a big deal

What cloud-based applications add in terms of coverage, they sometimes lack in terms of configurability. Baker had originally feared that not being able to make bespoke changes, as is possible with on-premises ERP systems, would mean the system would be inflexible. Fortunately these fears have not been borne out.

"When we moved across to the cloud I was really concerned about our loss of control and what we could and couldn't do," she said. "But Unit4 have been very good and where there are certain things that we used to do within the management console Unit4 and the cloud team are responsible for those now. They've set up functionality within the ERP to allow us to stop and start services, for example, which has been quite useful. And we got them to do some additional setup for us too, so that we could create interfaces a lot easier, and a replica database so that we can go and interrogate the data."

But there are always trade-offs

"There are certain things that obviously we can't do like we used to, such as if we need to onboard a new department, for example, we don't have the same ability to write to tables and load all the data in the same way," said Baker.

"There's still a bit of a concern over control but nowhere near as much as I thought there was going to be."

Should have rolled out cloud and ERP at the same time

The decision to deploy Azure was made after the ERP rollout was signed off, meaning the project had to be re-evaluated during the implementation.

"Originally when we made that decision we weren't sure we'd be moving to the cloud. In hindsight, it would have been nice to have made the decision for both at the same time," Baker said.

Manage expectations

People tend to dislike change, especially if they feel it's being imposed from on high. Therefore, it's vital to telegraph the changes well before they hit the user base.

"You've got to keep people on board the whole time and ensure that you have a good testing platform and with a multitude of different users, so they can they get an understanding of what you're changing."

And if the new system is a bit rough around the edges at launch, as is often the case with iterative rollouts, then expect the grumbles to get louder: people expect things to 'just work' out of the box.

"Communication is a really key thing," Baker said. "You've always got to be there, letting them know what's happening, and managing the expectations because automatically people think it's a new system so it's all going to be right on day one - when actually that's not always the case."

An example of a big change at Southampton was the overhauling of the Chart of Accounts, during which all the item codes were changed. "It was quite a big difference for our users, and that in itself was quite an ordeal," said Baker. "However, we tried to keep the rest of the systems within the financial modules very close to how they were before, so they have had the similar look and feel."

So far, so good

Moving to the cloud means the software is always up to date "rather than three or four upgrades behind like we were on premise", said Muncaster. It also means that new features can be rolled out much more quickly.

The cloud ERP system is now pretty much bedded in and the team is looking ahead to the next stage, which will be streamlining the various processes, integrating new sources and introducing more personalisation to the system, so that individual managers can tailor their view, with bespoke dashboards providing everything they need on one screen.

"That will be seen as a big win for our users, something that will benefit them directly rather than yet another change which they would see as for change's sake," Baker said.