British Council consolidates IT

Cultural agency streamlines global financial and planning

The British Council has spent £27m on a finance management and planning system to improve the control of its money and consolidate disparate systems at offices around the world.

The SAP-based Finance and Business System (Fabs) is viewed as a business transformation project that will cover 7,500 British Council employees working to build cultural relations in 110 countries globally.

Richard Phillips, Fabs’ programme director, says the system will deal with the incompatibility of many of the Foreign Office agency’s existing finance and planning systems.

‘For a large, global organisation things were becoming unsustainable. We had huge issues of reconciling data and making individual systems speak to each other,’ he said.

Because planning was carried out on a different system to accounting, it was difficult to track expenditure against real plans, says Phillips.

The Council decided it needed a single, largely automated system that would free its staff and managers from back-office duties and allow them to get on with their core missions.

The Council is implementing Fabs in stages.

The agency’s 1,300 UK employees were the first to use the new system, followed by its Indian offices. Other sites around the world will now follow.

The introduction of the technology and its associated process changes has not been entirely straightforward, says Phillips.

‘During the UK rollout we realised we hadn’t put enough effort into helping the users understand the new processes. We did do staff training, but people didn’t understand it as well as they thought,’ he said.

‘It took a long time to really bed the system down and stabilise it. However, things have now mostly settled down and are running well.

‘We have had a phenomenon where the problems emerge a month after the go live. People start to panic a bit, but that blip was much smaller in India than in the UK.

‘With the lessons of the UK and India, we will go to the next rollout in China in April this year and on through our other 11 world regions more smoothly,’ he said.

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