Europe’s largest local authority will not have a fully functioning cash system until April next year, three years after it went live on an Oracle ERP system intended to perform the task.

Birmingham City Council’s plan to switch from SAP to software from Big Red has seen its budget balloon from £20 million ($26 million) to potentially £131 million ($170 million) in a project once hailed by Oracle co-founder and CTO Larry Ellison as an exemplar of the company's competitive wins.

Although the new system went live in April 2022, which was already nearly 18 months late, the Council has been unable to produce auditable accounts using the Oracle system while it has experienced acute problems with bank reconciliation and cash management. The ongoing software problems have been compounded by an equal pay claim; together they caused the authority to become effectively bankrupt in September last year.

The council had implemented Oracle with significant customization - seemingly against its original plans - and since disaster struck in 2022 it plans to re-implement Oracle Fusion "out of the box."

A new report by external auditors Grant Thornton reveals that the Council, which is responsible for an annual budget of just under £3.2 billion ($4.1 billion), said: "We note that the council will not have a fully functioning cash system until April 2025 and the reimplementation of the ERP system will be circa September 2025. Until this point, the council will not have a fully functioning financial system."

Grant Thornton says the council had reviewed standard Oracle processes and came to the conclusion they would work effectively although the new software "will require significant transformation and culture change across people, process and technology, and the council Governance."

While considering reimplementing Oracle, the council was also executing a recovery program for the current implementation which Grant Thornton's report describes as "reactive and operationally focused."

One of the more serious problems, performance of the Bank Reconciliation System, was "being addressed in an incremental and incomplete manner," the report adds.

Earlier this year, The Register revealed that manual workarounds were set to cost the council around £5 million ($6.5 million) in the current financial year.

The Council has now chosen software CivicaPay - known as Civica Income Management - as the replacement for the BRS, and plans to have this in place for April 2025. It is also set to procure a new Oracle delivery partner, which will work with the council for three to five years. ®

https://www.theregister.com//2024/07/17/birminghams_oracle_system_cash_management/