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 set out 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 new 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 sets out a series of delays, which include replacing the project manager and the Covid-19 pandemic.
Insufficient input at the system design stage, due to ‘a lack of capacity and the right skill set’, also meant the council had to backfill its finance and HR teams, which it said came at a high cost because specialist staff were in short supply.
Vale of Glamorgan has carried out a ‘very comprehensive’ lessons learnt exercise, which identified 59 lessons.
