Council saves £7m with SAP project

by Will Hadfield

The London Borough of Waltham Forest has reported savings of £7m over five years by standardising its core systems on managed SAP applications. The London council is in a contract that pays systems integrator LogicaCMG just under £1m a year to run its SAP enterprise applications as managed services.

Since 2002, the council has implemented MySAP Financials, e-Procurement, HR, Customer Relationship Management and Plant Maintenance. A reduction in headcount of 30 staff and procurement savings from the applications have paid for the contract with Logica CMG, as well as reducing running costs by £7m, said the council.

Waltham Forest now plans to move other services on to SAP to realise further efficiency gains.

The MySAP Human Capital Management application is being rolled out in a £900,000 project to offer HR self-service functions to staff from July.

Chan Badrinath, executive director of corporate services at the council, said, "Managers are not able to do all of the HR processes at the moment. There are too many tasks for which managers are still using Excel."

The council said the MySAP CRM system it installed early last year had made a large contribution towards a 28% reduction in the number of complaints made to the council over the 2006/2007 financial year.

The council has kept the same number of people in its contact centre since implementing MySAP CRM. Savings have come from reducing the number of people employed in the back office.

The council has 550 staff using MySAP systems. When HR self-service is introduced, the number of MySAP users will grow to 2,500.

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