Oh never mind, the project was ‘reset’
It was all smiles when the City of Edinburgh Council announced the extension of its managed IT services contract with supplier CGI in September. But talk of smart city services using artificial intelligence and IoT belied a sorry tale of an abandoned Unit4 ERP project which led two suppliers to the courtroom door. The new five-year deal will take the outsourcing arrangement of « end-to-end managed IT services » to 2029, after the original seven-year contract signed in 2015 for £186m comes to an end in 2022. When the council and Canadian outsourcer CGI began working together, CGI planned to « automate and integrate back-office processes with a new Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. « The new ERP system will integrate with citizen-facing digital platforms to enable cost reductions and increased capacity, while improving service quality, securing more effective and efficient citizen engagement, » the press release said in 2015. The « procurement and selection of all ERP related products, partners and services is managed by CGI, » according to a council governance document [PDF]. As such, there is no record of their public procurement. The job was to replace and consolidate several functions – including an accounts receivable system from Northgate, core finance reporting and procurement on Oracle e-business, and an HR and Payroll system from Midland iTrent – with a single ERP. CGI and the Council opted for Unit4’s Business World, formally known as Agresso, a decision which only came into public view when, in 2018, the contractor ended up in Scotland’s supreme civil court [PDF], facing off Agilisys. Agilysis was subcontracted to provide the Unit4 solution. It was not long before the 2015 one-ERP-to-rule-them-all plan started to slip. A City of Edinburgh Council audit report from September that year said: « During the coming months the council will be preparing for an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system that is scheduled for autumn 2016. » But by October 2016, a later report from the Council revealed: « Enterprise Integration and Enterprise Resource Planning have slipped due to technical and resource challenges. » Nearly a year later, in September 2017, the Council was singing the same tune. « Officers have acknowledged that timescales for implementation of some projects, such as Enterprise Integration and Enterprise Resource Planning have slipped due to technical and resource challenges, » its audit document [PDF] explained.
