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ITEM CA17
CABINET
– 17 JANUARY 2006
"PROJECT
LINK"
Report by
Director for Social & Community Services
Introduction
- In May 2004, the
County Council commissioned Robson Rhodes to review their existing financial
management arrangements. The consultants’ report, considered by the
Executive in September 2004, identified significant weaknesses in the
financial controls within the Council’s Abacus Social Care system. The
existing technical solution is not delivering the required business
benefits and the lack of financial controls has resulted in:
- payments being
made to providers in error;
- amounts due
from debtors not being recovered; and
- client finances
being a contributing factor towards qualification of the Council’s
final accounts.
- In October 2004,
the Council (via Connexus) produced Phase 1 of a Social & Health
Care Application Review. This documented the existing processes and
technologies in use within the residential, domiciliary and money management
service divisions. This document was intended to provide a short-term
position statement to enable business continuity and provide the pathway
to a business case for a long-term business solution.
- This paper introduces
Project LINK – the proposed long term business solution. This has been
developed by Jon Netting (Social & Community Services’ Financial
Systems Implementation Manager) with assistance from Anite Public Sector
Ltd, LogicaCMG Ltd, the SAP Revitalisation Project and stakeholders
within the Resources and Social & Community Services Directorates.
Background
- Abacus software
(supplier Trojan) was implemented in 1993 and provides client assessment,
client database and care episode management for Adult Social Care (Residential
& Nursing and Fairer Charging). Payments are made directly from
Abacus and the system also issues debtor invoices and deals with cash
allocation to invoices.
- SWIFT software
(supplier Anite) was implemented (in part) in 1999 and is regarded as
the prime client information system to support the need of staff to
record and access essential client and associated information. It is
apparent, however, that SWIFT does not currently represent the prime
source of adult care client information. Information that is maintained
in SWIFT duplicates the Abacus information and it is the latter that
is relied upon for financial assessments, payment of providers, issuing
of debtor invoices and collection of payments.
- A number of issues
have a serious impact upon the operational integrity of Abacus and the
associated client finance business processes:
- Key processes
are manual, onerous, costly and not sustainable in the long run.
- Financial reconciliation
between our main financial systems is a difficult, resource intensive
process.
- Current systems
do not support the budget monitoring process.
- It is difficult
to provide accurate activity monitoring against key performance indicators.
- Reporting is
poor.
Proposal
- Work on the initiation
stage of Project LINK commenced during the summer of 2005. The project
has the following aims:
- To reduce the
overall number of disparate systems used within Social & Community
Services, consolidating processes and systems where appropriate.
- To hold accurate
and maintainable client and associated financial information on a
single ‘primary’ system.
- To integrate
the main Social & Community Services systems in a way that links
them together using common identifiers to produce a Directorate wide,
accurate and consistent management information and reporting facility
this facility to fully support the task of performance monitoring
and the production of key performance indicators.
- The transfer
of data between the main systems to be fully reconcilable and to be
supported by a full audit trail.
- Following the
development of a business case it was concluded that Abacus should be
retired and SWIFT developed as a full social care solution including
the processing of financial transactions where appropriate; and that
SWIFT should be fully integrated with the latest version of SAP ("SAP
R/3") which is being introduced in the Authority through the SAP revitalisation
project.
- Subsequently a
"gap analysis" between SWIFT and Abacus has been undertaken and a high
level system/solution design, high level project plan and a Project
Initiation Document have been developed for the project. The solution
recognises SAP R/3 as the organisation’s core finance system and that
all transactions created via SWIFT should be processed on SAP R/3 –
which will also hold all committed and actual expenditure.
- The solution will
see the implementation of the following SWIFT modules:
- Contracts
- Costed Packages
of Care
- Budget Management
- Financial Assessments
(Residential and Fairer Charging)
- Billing and
Collections
- Invoice Processing
- Independent
Sector Payments (Self Billing)
- Supporting People
(Invoice Processing)
- A number of electronic
interfaces will also be developed between SWIFT, the new Social &
Community Services Electronic Time Management Systems and SAP R/3.
Financial
and Staffing Implications
- Project LINK will
require a permanent project team of 4 staff during the duration of the
project (Project Manager, Business Analyst, Technical Developer and
Project Officer). The total projected cost for Project LINK is £950k.
This expenditure would be spread across 3 financial years:
2005/06 |
2006/07 |
2007/08 |
£100 |
£600k |
£250k |
- Post implementation
the system will require the support of two staff. The projected additional
annual maintenance and support costs (staff and licence fees) are £88k
per annum. Both the initial project cost and post-implementation revenue
costs have been identified in the current financial planning analysis
as non-discretionary pressures, but remain subject to ratification through
the budget process.
- The project plan
provides for a 3 phase rollout of the SWIFT modules:
- Phase 1 – Contracts,
Costed Packages of Care and Budget Management (Jan - Sep 06)
- Phase 2 – Financial
Assessments and Billing and Collection (June 06 - Jan 07)
- Phase 3 – Invoice
Processing/Self Billing and Supporting People Payments (Jan - Jul
07)
RECOMMENDATION
- The Cabinet
is RECOMMENDED to endorse the details of the project set out in the
report for implementation, subject to confirmation of the necessary
financial resources in the finally approved budget.
CHARLES
WADDICOR
Director for
Social & Community Services
Background
papers:
- Client Finances
Business Solution Project Brief. Richard Blundell (LogicaCMG), 16 Dec
2004
- Client Finances
Investment Business Case. Richard Blundell (LogicaCMG), 20 Feb 2005
- Client Finances
and Money Management Recommendations, Richard Blundell (LogicaCMG),
26 April 2005
- Client Finance
Business Case. Jon Netting (Social & Health Care), 4 Aug 2005
- Client Finance
High Level Design. Jon Netting (Social & Health Care), 24 Oct 2005
- SWIFT Finance
Project Initiation Document. Roy Pollen (Anite Public Sector), 1 Nov
2005
Contact
Officer: Simon Kearey, Business Manager, Tel: 01865 815565
January
2006
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