One of Europe’s largest local government authorities says the costs of its botched ERP programme have ballooned from £19 million to £144 million.

The dysfunctional programme to move off a legacy SAP system and onto Oracle Fusion has been reworked multiple times after initial implementations failed – and still isn’t delivering all the needed functions.

The council’s software and systems integration partners approved an initial go-live in 2022 despite the systems not being ready for production use. 

The background:

The council announced plans to move off its R/3 SAP system in 2018. 

It picked Oracle Fusion and initially planned to take new finance, HR, payroll, and procurement systems live by February 2021 for £19 million. It admitted this week that this plan had included just £1 million in contingency budget. 

(The imbroglio has been well covered by The Register, e.g. this week here.) 

Seven years on, the council said in a cabinet paper in June 2025 that “there are still complex and high risk workstreams to complete soon around data cleansing, data migration and business change, integration and reporting…” 

It has since bought third-party software to handle a banking reconciliation function. Its Oracle implementation is overhauled and still isn’t fully live.

'Insufficient change management"

The council added at the time: “The challenges surrounding the initial implementation are well documented, resulting from flawed configuration, lack of process redesign, lack of appropriate levels of testing, and insufficient change management when the solution was implemented.”

The council published a post-mortem by law firm Grant Thornton in February 2025. The firm found that the council had been “heavily reliant on external providers… placed reliance on their suppliers' tools and methodologies and did not have the capacity or capability to ensure those tools and methodologies were fit for purpose, or being deployed to an acceptable standard. Weaknesses in [their approach] went unchecked.” 

It named Oracle, Oracle partner Evosys (bought by Mastek in 2020) and Insight UK Ltd on the systems integration side; Socitm Advisory on the change management side; and Egress on the data migration side.

All approved an initial Go-Live that had to be rolled back. See below for a screenshot of Grant Thornton's report on a botched 2022 Go-Live.

Officers were ill-equipped to test whether the software really was ready. 

(The council took IT back in-house from Capita in 2019.)

“The programme continues to operate within the financial envelope set out in the Cabinet Report of June 2025,’ Birmingham City Council said this week. That includes £1,882,855 per year on Oracle SaaS licences and cloud costs. 

The council’s data as recently as six months ago remains a mess: “A major failing of the first implementation [was] a poor quality of data uploaded into the new solution,” the council said. Ongoing work includes a “Balance sheet cleanse to validate balances transferred – including historic debtors.”

The link has been copied!