Home Office shows how ERP can improve autonomy within organisation

The Home Office last week completed its shared services enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. The new ERP system cost the Home Office £13 million, but is expected to save the government department as much as £50 million due to greater back office efficiency and economies of scale using centralised systems and services.

As well as this, Home Office staff expect that the new system will improve productivity by allowing more self-service facilities and optimising processes like invoice payment and expense claims.

The system uses Oracle software as a shared service for a number of agencies, providing finance, procurement and human resources tools. Streamlining processes is about more than upping productivity, according to Fiona Spencer, Home Office Director of shared services; it also provides a strong basis for a better ethos for the whole organisation.

Spencer said that the new ERP system will "enable strong leadership and business ownership, the ability to make tough decisions and trust between all partners."

Inatech’s implementation of Oracle ERP to Harvest Foods is a similar case in point. In this project in June 2009, Inatech successfully managed the implementation of Oracle E-Business Suite R 12.0.5 to Harvest Foods Egypt, significantly reducing supply time.

Harvest Foods distributes over 80,000 units a month worldwide and required a system that allows project managers to plan customer demand and supply from raw materials to product delivery. Prior to the implementation of Oracle Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) by systems specialist Inatech, Harvest Foods struggled to provide a high-quality responsive service to its customers; the new high-performance integrated system will now reduce supply time by 50 per cent.

The new streamlined supply chain process now allows Harvest Foods more autonomy, as Oracle E-Business suite will help the company with decision making, providing very high-level information from across the company in real-time.

IT manager of Harvest Foods, Ibrahim Elawany, testified to this, saying: “The most important feature of this application is the accuracy of information retrieved to be able to assess supply demands. We are now able to control inventory and current assets for distribution. Oracle is the latest technology for the Internet; I can access the application remotely giving me full control of business operations.

“It is already reducing the time between sourcing materials to customer distribution that will also improve the quality of our products immensely.”