Birmingham city council still struggling with Oracle re-implementation challenges

Birmingham City Council’s ongoing efforts to re-implement its Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system are still fraught with significant hurdles, as detailed in a sobering report to the Audit Committee on 4 August 2025. Authored by Philip Macpherson, Director of Finance for the Brindley Oracle Programme, and led by Cllr Saima Suleman, the report lays bare the persistent issues plaguing the project, despite Cabinet approval on 24 June 2025 to proceed towards an April 2026 go-live.

The re-implementation, born from a deeply flawed initial rollout, has completed its design and prototype phase, but the report paints a grim picture of the road ahead. While the new design avoids the excessive customisations that crippled the original system, the programme remains mired in complexity, rated amber/red due to severe challenges.

Staff are overstretched, grappling with multiple change initiatives, while poor data quality and low organisational readiness threaten to derail progress. Data cleansing and migration, critical to success, are proving problematic, with issues from a recent trial run still unresolved despite ongoing efforts to improve data dashboards.

Testing for the Income Management System, vital to council operations, has been delayed, pushing its go-live to late September 2025. This slip, though within programme tolerances, underscores a troubling reluctance to compromise on quality after past failures. System integration testing has also been extended by two weeks to meet stringent standards, a move that strains the timetable, even with contingency time supposedly safeguarding the April 2026 deadline.

While governance has been bolstered with new structures, including a Directorate Change Leaders Group and appointed Business Sponsors, the report admits to ongoing struggles with business engagement. Forty additional training sessions are planned, but uptake alone may not bridge the gap in readiness. Interim fixes to payroll and statutory reporting keep the current system limping along, and the replacement of the Bank Reconciliation System, due in September 2025, adds further pressure. The offboarding of 20 remaining schools from Oracle, while on track for September, remains a logistical burden.

Exempt appendices conceal financial and procurement details, leaving questions about costs unanswered, though the programme is reportedly within budget. Risks are being tracked, but the high-level risk log in Appendix E reveals a daunting array of challenges, compounded by external oversight that highlights the scale of the task. Efforts to address data quality—through a balance sheet cleanse, a new CIPFA-compliant chart of accounts, and alignment of HR and finance structures—are underway but face significant hurdles to meet the required maturity by go-live.

The Audit Committee is urged to note the report and the faltering progress, with updates promised to the Corporate Finance Overview & Scrutiny Committee. Despite assurances of eventual success, the report’s cautious tone and the scale of unresolved issues cast serious doubt on Birmingham City Council’s ability to deliver a robust Oracle re-implementation by April 2026.Further details are available in the Oracle re-implementation Cabinet Report, accessible via Birmingham City Council’s official channels.

Full report is here.

Image source: TechSparx