ERP shared service to save MoJ £28m

The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) is moving towards a common enterprise resource planning (ERP) system across its whole operation after awarding Accenture a five-year £22 million shared services deal.

Accenture will work with Steria and Savvis in what is being hailed as “one of the first pan-departmental shared service solutions the UK central government”.  

Under the agreement, human resources, procurement, payroll and finance operations will be shared across the MoJ business network, including Her Majesty’s Courts and Tribunals Service, Her Majesty’s Prison Service and the MoJ head office. The Government claims this will save £28 million by 2014 and will improve accuracy and speed of the IT systems across a common platform.

Accenture will design, integrate and deliver the shared service system for over 80,000 employees and will also run and maintain the shared services IT service desk for the duration of the five-year contract.

The MoJ expects that managing delivery across multiple suppliers will ensure that expertise is drawn from many parts of the industry and integrated into a coherent solution and service.

Steria, under a £20 million contract, will implement an Oracle ERP system that will serve as a common operating platform across the department and, in the future, its associated agencies.  
It will work closely with the in-house team to consolidate  multiple legacy data systems and introduce self-service capability for staff. Steria’s core solution will be built around Oracle E-Business Suite R12, to provide the portal, case management, document management and management information solutions necessary to achieve the delivery of automated, self-service and minimal touch processes.

Steria is already working with Cleveland Police Authority in the transformation of back-office operations expected to deliver £50 million in cashable savings.

Savvis is providing hosted operations and services in a five-year, £14 million agreement.

It will give the MoJ access to its Government Wide Service (GWS), an infrastructure-as-a-service platform recently made available to all government departments and third-party suppliers in the UK, making it one of the first central government departments to use a cloud computing platform on such a large scale.

GWS provides a solution for government agencies looking toward a ‘G-Cloud’ model of hosted, reduced-cost IT operations and services.

Utilising the pre-built, accredited GWS platform virtually eliminates upfront capital costs for new projects and also decreases deployment time.

Government IT departments and suppliers benefit from immediate access to infrastructure and only pay for the consumption of their IT services, rather than the costly procurement, maintenance and management of hardware.

The MoJ joins the Home Office in using the GWS for delivering centralised applications.