FINANCE

Council incurs £3.7m overspend on IT system

Vale of Glamorgan Council took more than a year longer than planned to install a new IT system, leading to a £3.7m overspend.

Vale of Glamorgan Council took more than a year longer than planned to install a new IT system, leading to a £3.7m overspend.

In 2020, a business case outlined a £1.5m cost for the Welsh authority to replace its Oracle EBS system with cloud-based Oracle Fusion, which would manage its financial ledger, procurement, HR and payroll.

The system was scheduled to go live in January 2022 but was not in place until April 2023 – at a final cost of £5.2m.

A report to the council's corporate performance scrutiny committee laid out a series of delays, which included replacing the project manager and the Covid-19 pandemic.

The council was forced to backfill its finance and HR teams, which it said came at a high cost because specialist staff were in short supply.

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