The UK’s largest council by land mass, Highland Council, is moving forward with a significant digital transformation programme. The council will roll out local government specialist ERP TechnologyOne’s solution to streamline and automate its operations and gain access to real-time data for better decision making amid increasing inflationary pressures across the UK local government sector.

The solution, which includes Financials and Human Resource and Payroll, will be rolled out via TechnologyOne’s new transformational end-to-end offering, Solutions-as-a-Service (SaaS+). SaaS+ offers one fee, with no upfront costs, a guaranteed outcome and a drastically reduced implementation timeline. The single yearly fee contains all the costs required to implement, run, support and upgrade the best-in-class solution.

The TechnologyOne solution will allow the unitary authority, which serves a third of the land area of Scotland – including the most remote and sparsely populated parts of the?United Kingdom – to capture all financial information in a single place and manage the entire employee lifecycle from recruitment to off-boarding thus providing powerful dynamic reporting and enquiries for real-time decision making.

Edward Foster, Highland Council’s Head of Corporate Finance said the new partnership was a significant milestone in the council’s technology roadmap to deliver efficiencies, value for money and transformation and move forward in a post pandemic environment.

“We’re delighted to partner with TechnologyOne on this large-scale digital transformation programme. We saw not only how great their product was, but also realised our organisations were greatly aligned through a relentless focus on people and collaborative approach to problem solving,” Mr Foster said.

“The new solution meets changing requirements, offers better value, resilience and security and is flexible and adaptable for the future.”

Leo Hanna, UK Executive Vice President at TechnologyOne, said the company, which partners with local authorities across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, noticed a trend in local governments turning to technology to realise efficiencies and find ways to do more with less.

“We know local governments in the UK and around the world are facing huge challenges. Information sharing is stifled by a lack of integration of legacy systems and ageing infrastructures are carrying with them significant and increasing risk. When combined with inflationary and budget pressures, it means councils are continually asked to do more with less,” Mr Hanna said.

“Digital transformation in a time of severe economic pressure is hard. Our customers know it is no longer a ‘nice to have’, but the key to delivering services that are better targeted and more efficient. This was certainly the case with the team at Highland Council. They are absolutely committed to supporting their community by streamlining operations to find efficiencies and better ways to connect with residents.

“We know the three greatest impediments to investing in digital transformation are time to value, cost, and complexity. Our new SaaS+ offering is doing away with blown budgets and timelines and inherent complexity, instead bringing certainty to local government digital transformation programme.”

TechnologyOne partners with unitary authorities and district councils across the United Kingdom, including Blackpool Council, Conwy County Borough Council and Derby City Council.

This article is sponsored by TechnologyOne.