West Sussex County Council to spend £2.377m on licence for new business management system

Parts of the Oracle system – which will be used in areas such as paying staff and suppliers, debt recovery, accounting, HR administration, and buying goods and services – will be up and running by December 2025 and April 2026.

The five-year ‘software as a service’ licence which has helped the authority to prepare the way, was due to expire in June 2025 but had the option to be extended for two years.

The council has decided to add another year to that extension, taking it to 2028, with the option of extending it a further two years to 2030.

Choosing the 2030 extension would take the total contract value for the full 10 years to £8.364m.

A report from the council’s programme director for implementing Oracle said that sticking to the original two-year licence extension was not an option as discussions with Oracle had improved the commercial terms of the agreement for the council.

And doing nothing was obviously out as that would mean the system would be inaccessible after June 2025.

The Oracle system has not been cheap for the council.

It is being installed to replace the previous 20-year-old system, which had been constantly updated and was described as ‘obsolete and clunky’.

Oracle had been in the pipeline since November 2019, when a budget of £2.6m was approved. That was revised to £7m in August 2021 and to £14m in September 2022.

By May this year, it had reached £26m.