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Congrats, HCL, on your £1.5m contract to upgrade a county council's ERP system to SAP S4/HANA within a year

And good luck – you're gonna need it

A local authority in England's East Midlands has appointed HCL as the lead integrator for its SAP S/4HANA upgrade in a contract worth £1.5m.

Derbyshire County Council, which serves a population of nearly 800,000, is set to upgrade to the SAP Intelligent Suite, including the installation of the S/4HANA ERP system and data warehouse product BW/4.

According to a contract award notice, the council is looking to migrate its current "ECC Development system, quality assurance and production system" to S/4HANA, including HR compatibility packs to replicate current HCM functionality in payroll, time evaluation, organisation management and personnel administration, workflows, forms and travel and expenses.

Other highlights of the ambitious programme include the introduction of user experience system SAP Fiori and business intelligence tool SAP IQ, alongside the BW/4 data warehouse to support the council's data management strategy. The S/4 upgrade is also set to replace SRM 7, the supplier relationship management tool.

As part of the contract, HCL will be expected to upgrade the embedded Opentext vendor invoice management system and Epi Use Data Sync Manager for the HCM system.

The contract was expected to start in October 2020 and is set to end 30 September 2021. If the council expects to complete its ERP upgrade by then, it is giving itself a challenging timeline, to say the least.

The contract award offers options for SAP Cloud Platform and SAP Analytics Cloud, including configuration of artificial intelligence and chatbots. But the largely rural authority has also granted SAP a contract for the licences, support, and maintenance worth £4.9 million. It was awarded without competition because of the "absence of competition for technical reasons," another contract announcement said.

According to a Freedom of Information request, as of 2017 Derbyshire County Council was upgrading from ERP ECC6 with enhancement package EHP4.

Back in 2009, the council picked Capgemini to run a massive technology refresh starting April 2010. The £5.6m contract set out to replace the council's mainframe technology "with the latest SAP enterprise-wide systems designed for local authorities," a press notice published at the time said. ®

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