Fujitsu to help County Councils with shared services
London, 20 December 2010 – Fujitsu has successfully retained its contract with Cambridgeshire and Northamptonshire County Councils to work in partnership to deliver a pioneering shared service.
Fujitsu was originally appointed four years ago to deliver an ERP shared services platform based on Oracle e-Business Suite – this included functions such as financials, procurement and payroll. In March 2011 this contract was scheduled to finish and the Councils began to procure its replacement in June 2010. Fujitsu subsequently re-bid against a competitive field and was re-appointed; both Councils have agreed a new 7-year contract, projected to save the Councils approximately £7 million.
The two Councils are the founding partners of Local Government Shared Services (LGSS), the shared service venture set up to provide business support services to the Councils and potentially other public sector organisations. Through LGSS, Cambridgeshire and Northamptonshire County Councils share services including: finance, human resources, and procurement, supported by the ERP shared services platform.
The new contract will see Fujitsu provide shared application hosting, support, and development services to LGSS enabling them to leverage efficiency and cost saving benefits by streamlining internal business functions and IT infrastructure. The next stage of the LGSS programme will also see integration and streamlining of their internal processes delivering further savings.
With finances in the public and private sectors under pressure, these kind of deals are becoming more popular. Whether it’s projects to renew and refresh technologies, a drive to adopt cloud services, consolidate data centers or improve internal processes, identifying your bottlenecks both technical and non technical are the first steps to understanding where savings and improvements can be made. Simple things like the help desk processes, the way we schedule workloads or interact between the teams can be the difference between delivery as one cohesive IT team, or as a series of departments doing their bit and only their bit to get their job done. It will be interesting to see what range of technologies and concepts Fujitsu is planning to use to aid in service delivery, and if any cloud or bought in services might be leveraged, I’m off to read up more.
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