Thursday 12 March, 2015

Doncaster Council has saved £400,000 since implementing financial management and procurement software. The Council expects to save £2m as part of a wider strategic plan by 2017, through increased visibility and control of its finances and improved process efficiencies.

More than 1,000 people at the Council currently use the technology by Advanced Business Solutions (Advanced) which includes finance management system, procurement solution, budgeting & forecasting software and electronic document management technology.

Prior to implementing the solutions, the Council relied on a heavily paper and Excel-based system with manual data entry.

Simon Wiles, Director of Finance at Doncaster Council, says:

"Our processes are now much more streamlined and automated and we anticipate generating a further £1.2m in operational efficiencies. The remainder of our savings will come from empowering budget managers to take responsibility for their forecasting and monitoring and freeing up the financial management team to work more strategically."

By implementing the technology, the Council has been able to decommission several legacy systems, including a 20-year-old mainframe, leading to reduced licensing and support costs.

Later this year the Council will go live with a Supplier portal for suppliers to self-service.