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Story URL: http://www.silicon.com/publicsector/0,3800010403,39163462,00.htm

Birmingham seals mega SAP deal
Signs UK's largest ever local government software contract

By Tim Ferguson

Published: Monday 23 October 2006

Birmingham City Council (BCC) has signed the largest ever local government software deal with SAP as part of the city's massive transformation project.

The deal is part of the Service Birmingham joint venture between the city council and UK outsourcing company Capita, which is aiming to save the city around £1bn over 10 years.

The partnership was created earlier this year to work towards improving the efficiency and delivery of public services for the city, which has the UK's largest local authority annual budget at £2.9bn.

The initial SAP provision will be implemented by autumn of next year and Service Birmingham hopes to make around £100m of savings per year through a 15 per cent increase in productivity within five years.

SAP will provide the software platform which will allow the council to streamline its business processes. At present the council operates 158 different software packages and the SAP rollout will dramatically reduce this.

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Brendan Arnold, director of corporate finance at Birmingham, told silicon.com the new software platform will reduce costs and allow council services to respond more quickly to customer demands.

He said the SAP deal will play a large part in "improving and changing the way services are delivered to the front line".

Deputy leader of BCC, Paul Tilsley, added the SAP deal will be "key to achieving the council's ambition of more efficient services which better meet the needs of the people we serve".

The deal puts almost all of the SAP systems at the fingertips of the council, including, the SAP Business Suite and integration platform, Netweaver.

The full value of the deal has not been disclosed.