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Updated Gloucestershire County Council has ignored the recede are living date for its RISE with SAP transfer to the cloud, putting the public body at possibility of incurring a further £500,000 ($639,000) in charges to retain its legacy application up and running.
The west of England local authority, which can use £616 million ($788 million) on local products and services in total in the coming financial year, signed up to transfer its ageing SAP ERP gadget to the most trendy S/4HANA platform and the cloud in April 2022, with plenty of promotional fanfare from SAP.
The council committed to the so-known as “RISE with SAP” program in a contract worth £7.3 million ($9.3 million). RISE with SAP is SAP’s effort to win customers in the cloud by dealing with third-occasion pattern and cloud infrastructure suppliers on their behalf.
In January, the council’s Audit and Governance Committee head director of finance Paul Blacker confirmed the original gadget would recede are living on the 4th March 2024, “topic to gadget testing.”
However a council spokesperson confirmed to The Register that the original cloud-basically basically based gadget had if truth be told failed to recede are living on that date, and refused to ascertain plans for a future date.
With the exception of every other charges stemming from the prolong, it raises questions about how the council is keeping existing legacy SAP programs — first implemented in 2007 — up and running. In seeking authorization from the council’s cabinet in June 2021, officers said [PDF]:
“Moving to SAP Rise, which is the cloud-basically basically based most up-to-date version of SAP’s ERP software, would pink meat up the ICT diagram to transfer beneficial properties to cloud basically basically based solutions and hardware property out of the datacentre, and there could be a price avoidance of £0.5 million, which could be required to retain SAP servers running beyond December 2023.”
A council’s spokesperson refused to suppose whether or no longer the publicly funded body had incurred extra pink meat up charges for its legacy SAP solution, nonetheless said the replace used to be about to originate customers testing.
“All ERP migrations are advanced and wish to be smartly planned and it is excessive that we continue to train acceptable train and retain the programme under overview to be certain that that every technical and folk changes are delivered successfully ensuring that there’s minimum disruption to the products and services that we offer,” the spokesperson said.
“We’ve made most necessary growth with the technical compose and as we transfer more towards person testing and implementation we’re continuing to overview the later phases of our programme plans and timeline to be certain that that finally we maintain now a gadget that meets the council’s requirements. As our programme includes procurement as smartly as finance and HR, the introduction of the Procurement Act 2023 potential that we’re reviewing our requirements in this location.”
In the interim, the June 2021 documents also elevate questions about how aggressive the competition to replace SAP if truth be told used to be. The the same document stated suppliers that had expressed an interest in the competition were invited to tender. “Very top one response (from SAP (UK) Restricted) used to be obtained in response to the council’s ITT,” the document reads.
The appearance of the original SAP gadget used to be supposed to help with issues raised by official auditors Grant Thornton.
- SAP accused of age discrimination, retaliation by US whistleblower
- March Patch Tuesday sees Hyper-V join the guest-host tear membership
- City of London ditches Oracle for SAP in search of ERP enlightenment
- City council megaproject to use hundreds of hundreds for e book work Oracle gadget used to be meant to compose
Blacker had informed Audit and Governance Committee in January that “the original SAP Machine could be in dwelling for the original financial year and it will help to resolve some of the failings raised. Individuals remarked over the prolong in the installation of SAP, officers explained it used to be better to prolong in bid to win it factual.”
Any delays are certain to taint the RISE with SAP programme, upon which the German supplier seems to be to be betting the farm. Yet every other RISE with SAP customer, UK grocery store Asda, has also had its S/4HANA cloud implementation delayed. In January, it used to be compelled to lengthen a pink meat up affiliation with its previous proprietor, US retail huge Walmart, to retain the existing SAP programs up and running.
ERP initiatives maintain an uncanny knack of running overschedule, overbudget, or fair no longer working to plan when deployed. Correct inquire of the County Councils in Surrey, East Sussex, West Sussex, and Norfolk.
None of those much less-than-gentle running implementations, on the different hand, can maintain a candle to Birmingham City Council’s borked installation. ®
Updated at 1608 UTC on March 15, 2024, to add
Following newsletter of this article, earlier than which we again and again requested for a response regarding the aptitude £500K contract extension charges, Gloucestershire County Council finally addressed this point. A PR person told us:
