UK government-appointed commissioners have labeled Birmingham City Council's Oracle Fusion rollout as "the poorest ERP deployment" they have seen.
A report published by the UK council's Corporate Finance Overview and Scrutiny Committee found that 18 months after Fusion went live, the largest public authority in Europe "had not tactically stabilized the system or formulated clear plans to resolve the system issues and recover the operation."
The city council's cloud-based Oracle tech replaced the SAP system that it began using in 1999, but the disastrous project encountered a string of landmark failures. The council has failed to produce auditable accounts since Oracle was implemented in 2022, costs have ballooned from around £19 million to a projected estimate of £131 million and, because the council chose not to use system audit features, it cannot tell if fraud has taken place on its multibillion-pound spending budget for an 18-month period.
In September last year, the council became effectively bankrupt due to outstanding equal pay claims and the Oracle implementation.