Partner Article

Advanced Business Solutions delivers eleventh-hour IT project ‘rescue’ for Moray Council

Moray Council in Scotland has praised Advanced Business Solutions (Advanced) for its rapid turnaround of an urgent IT migration project after their existing managed services provider went into administration.

The council, which had been using an external managed service, decided to bring its finance management system back in-house to reduce running costs following severe public sector cutbacks. However, the migration project risked being derailed when the service provider went into administration earlier this year. Advanced worked closely with the Council and managed to recover the service and bring it in-house within just three weeks.

A loyal customer of Advanced for 20 years, Moray Council uses its e5 finance system to manage its general ledger, accounts payable, accounts receivable, sales invoicing and procurement processes.

Diane Beattie, Payments Manager at Moray Council, explains, “When our former managed service provider went out of business, we were concerned because we thought that we might lose all our data. As we had built up a strong relationship with Advanced over the years, we approached them for support.

“Advanced consultants reacted very quickly. They retrieved all our data and built a live system within a week, which we went live with two weeks later. The support was fantastic.”

Advanced’s finance management system, e5, has also supported the council’s procurement improvement plan which achieved £1.9 million in annual procurement savings thanks to tight integration between systems, centralised visibility and greater control of spending.

“e5 enables us to function as efficiently as possible. It’s fully integrated, links to accounts charts and allows online authorisation. The system also processes our year-end reports and budget management information on a monthly basis for more than 200 budget managers.”

The council has seen some of the biggest benefits after creating a centralised procurement team.

Beattie continues, “We have always seen strong benefits from the e5 system, since we implemented it in 1994 and today we are making the most of the functionality. We have reported annual savings of £1.9 million from procurement alone. It’s a seamless, end-to-end process from start to finish.”

As well as benefitting from significant cost savings, the council has also saved time. Since centralising procurement, the time taken to process an order to payment transaction has resulted in a reduction from 45 to just 12 minutes.

“Moray Council is one of 32 authorities in Scotland which is under pressure to maximise efficiencies and save costs,” concludes Beattie.

Advanced Business Solutions is a division of Advanced Computer Software Group plc, a leading supplier of software and IT services to the health, care and business services sectors.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Advanced Computer Software .