Warwickshire flag VexiloHogweard [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)]MHR has announced that Warwickshire County Council (WCC) has replaced its core ERP solution that delivers payroll and HR to iTrent. For 15 years WCC used Oracle E-Business Suite version 12.1.3. That contract was due to expire in March 2017, though rolled on annually. It had managed the 28,000 people across the county. WCC operates a payroll service that it delivers to several organisations including district councils, schools as well as fire and rescue.

The migration to iTrent has enabled it to deliver a more personalised service to each of those organisations. This includes the ability to deliver far more self service functionality than previously. The press release is unclear as to when it went live. However, it was certainly live in July 2018 when a freedom of information request revealed its use.

The timing of the announcement is presumably linked more to the realisation of business benefits and that it may have just completed it first full year of the new solution. Those benefits included the streamlining of business processes. Many of the tasks are now carried out by the benefiting organisations who are able to access the solution through a web browser. This includes data input which has eliminated duplicate entry and potentially reduced errors across the operation.

These time and motion savings are hard to quantify. There are some hard cash savings though. According to its savings plan the new HR and Payroll system is already due to deliver £229,000 in financial savings to the council in 2019/20.

Felicity Davies, Your HR programme lead said: “Warwickshire County Council is pleased to be working in partnership with MHR to deliver a new HR and payroll system which we believe will deliver efficiencies and an improved way of working.

“As part of the council’s transformation programme we are looking at our processes to see how we can do things differently. iTrent offers greater functionality and flexibility for WCC and enables us to future-proof our operations.” 

Phase 2 about to start

Anton Roe, Chief Executive Officer at MHR commented: “We are delighted to have helped Warwickshire County Council bring its HR and payroll processes right up to date. By making clever use of iTrent’s self-service functionality the council has been able to reduce the amount of administration carried out centrally and generate important cost savings. We look forward to learning of further savings and efficiencies when phase two is completed later this year.”

Phase 2 will deliver further cost savings to WCC as it looks to leverage the learning management and elearning option build into iTrent. This will enable it to replace its current WILMa (Warwickshire Interactive Learning Management application) currently provided by Learning Pool. It is expected to provide £31,000 in cost savings each year in licence costs. There may be other elements to phase 2 but no further information was found.

Enterprise Times: What does this mean

This is a good win for MHR, removing Oracle EBS from a significant council. Other councils will heed both the success of the project and the cost savings that the council has achieved. What isn’t known is which other vendors WCC considered. Next up is presumably its financial systems that are currently run on Unit 4 Agresso.

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