HispanicBusiness

Solihull Metropolitan Borough Council Saves $1.6 Million in Costs by Upgrading to Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1 with an In-house Project Team

•Solihull Metropolitan Borough Council provides a full range of council services for 89,000 households in the town of Solihull, England, including health and social care, government social benefits payments, transportation, streets and parking, education, environmental health, refuse and recycling, and housing. •The council strives to meet customer needs while delivering a greater number of public services for less cost. Its customers increasingly expect personalized services, rather than a one-size-fits-all approach. •To better serve its customers, Solihull initiated a strategy to move key functions related to customer contact from the back office to the front office and made the Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1 the cornerstone of its administrative operations with a move to more employee self-service functions with Oracle Internet Expenses, Oracle iProcurement, and Oracle Self-Service HR, as well as a single view of each customer's interactions with the council using Oracle TeleService. •By moving 80 percent of its back office operations to the front office, the council has been able to improve operational efficiency and reduced costs, while also improving customer satisfaction. •To protect and extend the value of these applications while improving its support options, Solihull Metropolitan Borough Council upgraded to the latest release of the Oracle E-Business Suite, which enabled the Council to eliminate a number of customizations and meet several legislative requirements. •"As a small English local government authority, we have only a modest ICT capacity at Solihull Council. Upgrading to the Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1 and staying current brings benefits to us. Oracle was the right choice for us when we first invested and continues to be so now. It has provided a great platform for growth and future development," said Steve Halliday, Head of ICT, Solihull Metropolitan Borough Council. "The Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1 is our core strategic enterprise application for administration and support services and we have made a decision to maximize our return on investment in our systems and our people."

Chicago Public Schools Expands its Oracle E-Business Suite Footprint to Scale for Future Growth under Budgetary and Staffing Constraints

•Chicago Public Schools (CPS) is the nation's third-largest school district and the second-largest employer in Chicago. It serves approximately 409,000 students in 675 schools. •CPS upgraded to the Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1 to gain new functionality and enable the system to scale for future growth under extreme budgetary and staffing constraints. By upgrading to the Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1, CPS has been able to reduce the previous system's customizations with minor impact to its 6,000 users in 700 departments. •Building upon its existing investment in the Oracle E-Business Suite and Oracle's PeopleSoft applications, CPS implemented additional products within the Oracle E-Business Suite, specifically Oracle Projects and Oracle Enterprise Asset Management to manage and monitor work orders more efficiently for the school district's $500 million capital funds for numerous construction and IT projects across 900 buildings. •The new applications enabled CPS to support the full lifecycle of project and portfolio management with a single, accurate view of all 300 projects and related activities and allowed CPS to better track warranties and maintenance for building equipment at more than 900 locations, enabling better preventative maintenance and a reduction in reactionary spending. •Oracle Enterprise Asset Management was installed to manage work order management, work order requests, and preventive maintenance for more than 200,000 assets. •CPS also installed other complementary applications to the Oracle E-Business Suite at the time, including Oracle's Primavera Contract Management to provide comprehensive tracking for each contract submittal, and Oracle User Productivity Kit to speed adoption of the new applications for more than 6,000 users. •Taking advantage of the value of Oracle's integrated applications and technology stack, CPS also deployed Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition as an enterprise reporting tool for more than 40 applications and across all 700 departments, enabling users to access a single data source and to create and run their own reports. •"The new features in the latest version of the Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1 will enable us to operate more efficiently and effectively, for example, by streamlining management of the US$5.5 billion in our operating and capital funds," said Prasad Nettem, Director for Enterprise Financial Systems, Chicago Public Schools.