IBC Update 22 October 2014

IBC launched on 1 st July which was major system and process re-design The implementation was a very large-scale necessary change, driven by the need to reduce costs but also to move away from a system that was reaching obsolescence The implementation has not been as smooth and more issues have been identified than we had hoped The impact that this has had on staff personally within schools is acknowledged and I can only apologise for this as it was obviously never the intention We have listened very carefully to feedback and responded with significant changes over the summer with more planned Introduction

School specific approaches Changes to the standard model were implemented to reflect some of the requirements of school customers: all suppliers used by schools preceding go live loaded into ‘cant find’ function (c.29,000) direct telephone access to ‘old’ teams / individuals rather through CIC dedicated school help pages dedicated telephone support on purchasing / eStore majority of ‘existing’ Finance Reports published through the Portal dedicated IBC Customer Relationship Manager appointed

Positive feedback post go live AreaFeedback HR TransactionsUser friendly, intuitive and improvement on old systems Employee Self Service (ESS) LiteUser friendly and easy to use, enable staff to view and maintain their own information directly Petty cash and journal transfersEasy to use and significant reduction in information required to perform action

Actions since go-live We listened very carefully after go-live and acted with short term ‘fixes’ and permanent enhancements (some already delivered and more planned) AreaAction CommunicationFormal letter issued from Director of Children's Services and Director of Corporate Resources to all Admin Officers, Head Teachers, Governors acknowledging the challenges and impacts on schools and staff and providing an overview of actions TrainingFeedback from schools requested face to face training to support implementation and we responded to this need as follows 172 eStore shadowing sessions 33 face to face drop in sessions 35 half day training sessions / 540 spaces across the County 98% of attendees rated the half day training sessions as useful / extremely useful

AreaAction eStore Schools specific catalogue created enabling non-contracted suppliers to be catalogued Significant focus on ‘stocking’ the catalogue with >165,000 products (increased from 60,000 in July) incl.75,000 school specific products available though non contracted suppliers 40% of all orders are placed with 109 suppliers (34 of these have now been catalogued) Service Pack 5 implemented on 20 Oct which delivered: COG now fixed enabling GL at cart level ‘apply changes to other items’ button now enables ability to apply storage location, SIO, delivery dates and cost centre to items within a shopping cart overall system stability some minor ‘bugs’ identified and are currently being investigated eStore speed enhancement implemented on 20 Oct which delivered noticeable improvement

AreaAction Invoicing Visibility of the invoice when a customer goods receipts enabled in early Sept Expanded BAU invoicing team (being increased by 30%) to focus on processing new invoices Set up of a new dedicated ‘backlog’ team (now in place): target to clear all (known) invoices within 6 weeks Development of resource to support: key suppliers around ‘quality’ of invoicing key managers around how to raise typical purchase orders

Next steps Customer engagement - an IBC ‘user / network group’ has been set up with school admin officers eStore - continue to ‘load’ the top 109 vendors which would enable 40% of all orders to purchased through the easy to use eStore (likely to take between 6-9 months) Invoicing – clearing all (known) invoices within 6 weeks P-Cards - Promote the use of P-Cards for appropriate purchases through EFS and associated channels Communication & Business Change issue regular communications to ensure school customers are kept updated on progress purchasing provide guidance on how PO’s should be raised for top ‘x’ orders to increase the chance of the invoice matching when received