Meeting documents

Cabinet
Tuesday, 17 January 2006

CA170106-17

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ITEM CA17

CABINET – 17 JANUARY 2006

"PROJECT LINK"

Report by Director for Social & Community Services

 

Introduction

  1. 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.

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. Background

  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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

  1. 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.

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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)

  1. A number of electronic interfaces will also be developed between SWIFT, the new Social & Community Services Electronic Time Management Systems and SAP R/3.
  2. Financial and Staffing Implications

  3. 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:


  4. 2005/06
    2006/07 2007/08
    £100 £600k £250k

  5. 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.
  6. 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

  1. 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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