Three ERP modernisation programmes worth £1.2 billion announce their SaaS

If the government’s civil servants had set out to make sure the three big ERP vendors all got a slice of action under a trio of massive departmental HR and finance software standardisation programmes, they couldn’t have done it better; with £1.2 billion now allocated to three well-known names. 

• The “Matrix Programme?” (£144 million in total.) Won by Workday. 
• The “Synergy Programme?” (£710 million in total.) Won by Oracle. 
• The “Unity Programme”? (£366 million in total.) Won by SAP. 

The trio of central government-funded ERP programmes have now all announced their contractors, with Unity last to announce, on November 15. They were born out of a March 2021 "Shared Service Strategy" to align core operations, processes, and back-office tech – created after government departments were found to be tendering separately for ERP modernisation; with many running near-end-of-life systems; for example HMRC's SAP ECC 6.0, which ends mainstream support in 2027.

HM Revenue and Customers (HMRC), the Department for Transport (DfT), and the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) were the latest to announce their new ERP contractor as the British government works to join up its hugely scattered sets of systems.

The three departments have teamed up under the “Unity Programme” to establish shared services across finance, HR, payroll and procurement. On November 15 they announced that SAP has landed a £246 million agreement to provide a cloud-hosted SaaS, with Deloitte winning an attached five-year £120 million as Systems Integrator (SI) contract. 

The contract notice comes weeks after The Stack revealed that Workday had  beaten SAP and Oracle to the £144 million “Matrix Programme” ERP deal that will standardise systems in the cloud across nine other departments, with Cognizant contracted as the SI for that set of work.

The Synergy Programme, meanwhile, led by the Department for Work and Pensions, Ministry of Justice, Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs; and Home Office (HO), signed up Oracle as the SaaS provider and IBM as the systems integrator under a £710 million programme.

The two suppliers will develop a new Common Operating Model (COM) and common data standards across the departments, with the software serving over 250,000 civil servants, the project leaders said last month. 

Stay focussed.

The project owners will know well that they are attempting a challenging project and that the fields of the public sector are littered with the bodies of digital transformation programmes that died inglorious deaths.

As a 2021 National Audit Office report noted crisply, “despite 25 years of government strategies and countless attempts to deliver digital business change successfully, our reports show a consistent pattern of underperformance… Digital leaders told us programme teams often rush to a solution because of pressure to deliver quickly, and do not spend enough time understanding the business need, the existing system or what business improvement the programme team wants to deliver..."

Lessons, at this point, do appear to have been learned in some quarters and plenty of joined up thinking is happening. Whether HMG can sustain the focus of the civil service leaders on the task at hand without rotating them into other pastures or them jumping ship for better paid private sector job to the detriment of contractor relationships and project outcomes is another question. We live in hope.

See also: Met Police to replace “clunky” £430m ERP - as 50 integrations, rampant "off-system data processing" ring alarms