EMSS strengthens shared services delivery with Oracle Cloud
East Midlands Shared Services modernizes HR and finance processes on Oracle Cloud, creating a fit-for-purpose shared service product to drive growth.
“With Oracle Cloud we have streamlined our employee and financial services operations. We are well positioned for the future service delivery demands of our public and private sector customers.”
Business challenges
East Midlands Shared Services (EMSS) is a partnership formed in 2010 between Nottingham City Council and Leicestershire County Council to deliver HR and financial shared services for the councils and other public sector customers. The partnership provides over 60,000 staff members and customers with a finance, procurement, HR, and payroll solution, and has jointly saved the councils more than £2 million since its inception.
As part of its Fit for the Future program, EMSS needed to modernize its service offering with an internet-enabled tech platform to provide more efficient services to its partner organizations and customers. For example, it wanted to introduce employee self-service functionality so that managers and employees could have the HR data they need at their fingertips. This would also relieve the EMSS service desk, which was already handling thousands of calls and emails per year.
EMSS also wanted to streamline its HR processes, many of which were manual and required duplication of effort—such as keying in timesheet and other HR data sent in by council employees and managers who work remotely.
Like many public service organizations, EMSS was also looking to reduce operational expenses, including the costly ongoing support and maintenance of its customized on-premises HR and finance systems.
We had to make the right choices about the system to make sure that it was the most appropriate for local government and that it could take us through the next 10 to 15 years. We conducted a full analysis of what the market had to offer and Oracle Cloud came out on top.
Why East Midlands Shared Services chose Oracle
Prior to the vendor selection process, EMSS conducted a workshop program to capture all the issues that the partners were facing with the legacy system as well as their aspirations and vision for the future. Once the team had drilled down into the specific system requirements, it conducted a tender process to consider a range of best-of-breed HR and finance platforms from the major software vendors.
It selected Oracle Cloud because it was the most suitable solution to meet its current and future needs in the public sector.
Results
EMSS saved significant amounts of HR administration time by deploying Oracle Cloud HCM to streamline HR processes for tens of thousands of employees across public and nonprofit organizations. Where employees previously filled out timesheets or expense reports on paper, they now enter data directly into Oracle Cloud HCM. This has eliminated duplication of efforts and led to higher data accuracy in salary payments.
With Oracle Cloud HCM and Oracle Cloud ERP, EMSS has standardized HR and finance processes across its diverse customer base, which includes a city council, a county council, and numerous commercial customers. The standardization has provided EMSS with a model that will drive its business expansion, and will enable EMSS to provide HR, finance, and other fit-for-purpose local government administration services to public sector customers.
EMSS enhanced its service offering to customers by leveraging the self-service function of Oracle Cloud. Managers in partner organizations no longer need to contact EMSS staff for HR or financial information because they can access the data themselves at any time and from anywhere. Regular employees can also check their salary slips or manage their annual leave, without the assistance of EMSS personnel. It has also substantially reduced the number of calls and emails to EMSS’s service desk, relieving the burden on HR and finance administration specialists.
EMSS also increased customer satisfaction by empowering managers with an easy-to-use, comprehensive, intuitive tool for HR and finance-related activities, which enables them to focus on their core tasks of improving council services for local citizens. This is a significant improvement over EMSS’s legacy system, which had limited functionality and required managers to fill out and send by email several non-integrated e-forms.
In addition, the organization substantially reduced operational costs, as it no longer needs to spend money to maintain IT infrastructure. Also, software upgrades previously performed every few years and at great expense are now carried out automatically and more frequently, which has allowed EMSS to further reduce its manual workload.
The Oracle Cloud implementation considerably advances EMSS’s Fit for the Future program, which was designed to streamline processes and improve reporting and data integration while supporting an agile, flexible, and digitally enabled workforce. The implementation also supports the digital-first strategies of EMSS’s two partner councils as they seek to provide more digital and online services to residents.
Partners
To implement its Oracle Cloud platform, EMSS selected Oracle Platinum Partner Evosys because of its long experience with Oracle Cloud implementations in the public sector. EMSS has had a very positive relationship with Evosys, which supported the company throughout the entire project.