Dudley councillors assured staff will get paid on time when new IT system goes live
The ERP is currently being designed by transformation consultancy Embridge and planned to go live on September 1, 2027.
Watchdog Dudley councillors have been assured staff will get paid on time when a new IT system goes live next year.
Members of the authority’s Core Business Scrutiny Committee were briefed on the council’s Enterprise Resource Planner (ERP) which will combine HR, Payroll and finance into one system with the aim of improving efficiency.
The ERP is currently being designed by transformation consultancy Embridge and planned to go live on September 1, 2027.
Speaking at the committee meeting on July 23, Cllr Qasim Mughal asked senior officer Andrew Simmons, who is in charge of introducing the ERP, for answers on how the council would cope if the roll-out did not go according to plan.
Cllr Mughal said: “You mentioned you are fairly confident that you’ll meet those deadlines, my main thing is about payroll.
“You said you had three months where you are going to do, effectively, a dummy run, is there a backup?
“Say those timelines don’t go ahead, the contract of the current payroll ends and we are not ready, do we have a contingency in place?
“We don’t want employees not being paid, that’s going to be disastrous.”
Mr Simmons told councillors a standard three month implementation would be expected to see the new system matching the existing system and he hoped there would also be a ‘firebreak’ where the council would have more time if necessary before bringing the system on stream.
Dudley Council chief executive, Balvinder Heran, added there are also backup systems in place to cope with outages.
The new system will cost around £100,000 more per year to operate and councillors wanted to know if they were getting value for money.
Dudley Council cabinet member for finance, Cllr Steve Clark, said: “We haven’t updated the system in 10 or 15 years this is the right thing to do and the right time to do it.
“It can be delivered on time and on budget.”
Ms Heran said: “We talk about resources being stretched at the council, as we implement more and more products like this one of the biggest gains is capacity release.
“By freeing up capacity it means officers in the frontline teams have got more capacity to support residents.”
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