Lambeth council tenders for shared ERP

Lambeth council has launched a procurement for a framework to support a shared service operation of an Oracle e-Business Suite for itself and several other London boroughs. It is part of Programme Athena , under which a group of councils in the capital are moving towards common processes and procedures for HR, financials and procurement using a shared enterprise resource planning system. The main purpose of the procurement is to contract an integrator to support the transition to a shared R12 version of the Oracle e-Business suite when support for the R11 version ends in November 2013. The tender document in the Official Journal of the European Union says that Barking & Dagenham, Brent and Lewisham are all in discussions to make use of the framework along with Lambeth, and that once it is in place other councils will be able to make use of the shared version of R12. It mentions Croydon and Havering as being among those that could join the service. It also says the agreement will be in place for four years, with any contracts called off under it to run for up to four years. The value is estimated at between £74m and £88.5m. The procurement has been divided into three lots: systems integration for the transition to R12, managed service hosting and software support. A single company will be responsible for each, and it is possible that one firm will take two or all three lots. This article is published by Guardian Professional. For weekly updates of news, debate and best practice on public sector IT, join the Government Computing Network here.