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£19m budgeted. £216.5m lost.

Birmingham City Council replaced its SAP system with Oracle.

ERP LEADERS news desk · · First reported by The Register · Edition no. 1

The 2021 business case put it at £19 million plus £1 million contingency, live in April 2022.

It went live. The council's own forecast cost of the programme to 2027/28 is now £144.4 million. Investigators put the total money lost, overspend plus the savings that never arrived, at £216.5 million. The Register works that out at roughly £200 for every person living inside the council boundary.

Two lines in that record matter more than the headline number. Fraud detection audits were switched off for more than 18 months. And £2 billion of transactions landed in the wrong financial year, inside a system meant to steward £3 billion of taxpayer revenue.

Go-live day cost the council very little. The eighteen months afterwards did the damage, with the controls that would have caught it turned off to keep the system moving.

If your finance system lost its audit trail this quarter, how long before anyone noticed?

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Companies in this story
SAPOracle

Our file on SAP

  1. 5 NovFiled later

    SAP says its network handles over $8 trillion of trade a year. Its AI agent post names no customer.

  2. 5 NovFiled later

    SAP says AI agents handle more than 90% of a wholesaler's 100,000 supplier confirmations unaided. Its Takeda figures are forecasts.

  3. 5 NovFiled later

    SAP says Somerset Council moved about 8,500 staff off its 17-year-old payroll system in 13 months, on budget. Nobody named the budget.

  4. 5 NovFiled later

    SAP offered 300 AI agents. Workday's product chief, a former SAP executive, called the autonomous enterprise idea "cold and soulless".

  5. 4 NovFiled later

    SAP won a Dutch military cloud deal of up to ten years. The ministry says it does not end its SAP dependence.

All 101 SAP stories

For your next steering committee

Questions for your own programme. They are not findings about any company in this story.

  1. 1Ask for the approved budget and the current forecast on the same scope, side by side.
  2. 2Ask which costs sit outside the programme budget today: internal staff, data migration, parallel running.
  3. 3Ask who may approve the next increase, and at what amount the programme goes back to the board.

Issue 01 of the ERP LEADERS brief puts a timeline, the three-number review and six questions on one page. Read issue 01

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