With automation, London borough focuses on finance strategy
Lambeth Council improves decision-making, cuts costs, and frees up resources with Oracle Cloud finance and HR applications.
“One of the reasons for moving to Oracle Cloud was to eliminate the cumbersome customizations in our on-premise legacy environment. Now, everything is standardized. There are fewer processes to learn so managers and staff can devote more time to supporting residents’ needs.”
Business challenges
Lambeth Council, the governing body of London’s largest inner-city borough, employs about 3,000 people and provides more than 800 types of social, public works, maintenance, education, and other services to the borough’s 345,000-plus residents. Amid substantial budget cuts but no letup in the demand for services, Lambeth Council sought ways to cut costs and improve efficiencies while creating new sources of revenue on top of the £1 billion it now takes in annually.
Part of that mission involved simplifying and standardizing its myriad—and disconnected—finance, procurement, payroll, and HR systems and processes. The goal: Cut costs and unlock data silos, while giving managers the software tools they need to report and analyze that data to make more informed investment, contract, hiring, and other decisions.
Lambeth Council also needed to give its employees—most of whom now work remotely at least two days a week as part of the council’s office-building consolidation—anytime, anywhere access to those tools. And it wanted to get out of the non-core business of managing its own computer hardware and software. So a cloud solution was a must.
Why Lambeth Council chose Oracle
Results
Since moving its financial processes in Oracle Cloud ERP and EPM, Lambeth Council’s budget monitoring and forecasting are transparent and automated via online dashboards and tools. Its finance team has reduced manual journal entries by 45%, freeing staffers to focus on value-added work.
With the procurement module of Oracle Cloud EPM, the council can now manage its entire indirect purchasing process—from inviting bids to final payment—in a single system. As a result, the council has reduced its number of suppliers by 19%, while giving its active ones self-service features that have reduced the number of basic though time-consuming queries.
Meantime, the intuitive self-service features of Oracle Cloud HCM have led to a 55% improvement in appraisal and performance reporting, allowing the council’s HR team to allocate fewer resources to share a greater workload.
More broadly, the ability for employees to access the Oracle Cloud applications from any location has made it much easier for them to work from home or other remote locations, enabling the council to reduce its office space from 14 buildings to just 2.
Partners
Evosys helped London Borough of Lambeth become one of the first public sector organizations to go live on an end-to-end Oracle integrated cloud suite, inclusive of Oracle Cloud Local Government Payroll.