Birmingham City Council’s SAP-to-Oracle project is set to cost £144.4 million – more than seven times earlier estimates – as it waits for a fully functioning system five years after its planned go-live date.

Keen readers will know the sorry saga of the ERP disaster at Europe’s largest local authority. For the uninitiated, highlights include going live with a system unfit to manage the council’s £3 billion in taxpayer revenue and multibillion-pound spending budget; a decision to turn off audits for fraud detection for more than 18 months; allocating £2 billion in transactions to the wrong year; and multiple delays and overspending.

Pertaining to the last item on this list of shame, Birmingham City Council has released new figures. In a written response published with its council meeting this week, officials said the total forecast cost of the program up to the 2027/28 financial year is £144.4 million, up from an initial estimate of £19 million with a £1 million contingency. In 2024, the total budget approved across financial years 2018/19 to 2025/26 was £131 million.

The project began in 2018, when the council planned to move away from its legacy R/3 SAP system to more modern software. Having picked Oracle Fusion, it initially planned to go live in December 2020 for finance and procurement, and in February 2021 for HR and payroll. According to a 2021 business case, this was re-planned with a revised launch in April 2022 for both functions.

Having hit the project milestone, things went from bad to worse. Although the council had planned to implement Oracle “out-of-the-box,” it created several customisations including a banking reconciliation system that failed to function properly. The council struggled to understand its cash position and was unable to produce auditable accounts. It has spent more than £5 million on manual workaround labour.

The Oracle implementation – along with poor management of equal pay cases – led to the council becoming effectively bankrupt in 2023.

The council has now bought a third-party solution to cover the banking reconciliation function, and is reimplementing Oracle from scratch, a project that was due to go live in April, and has now been delayed by several months.

The mushrooming cost of the project also needs to take into account the fact that schools have been removed from its scope, a move that might have led to reduced costs.

Nor does ballooning spending reflect how much the authority might be out of pocket in total. The initial project had banked expected savings in the millions from the 2022 go-live date. Anticipated savings of £69 million in 2023/24 were written off. In 2024, investigators put the total money lost at £216.5 million, which might climb by £10 million or so, given the new cost projection.

At around £225 million, the money lost equates to about £200 per person within the council’s boundaries.

Birmingham City Council’s doom laden Oracle finance and IT project – now four years behind schedule – has been delayed to at least the summer, it has been revealed.

The project, supposed to provide the council with a gold-standard finance, procurement and IT service fit for the 21st century, has been dogged with huge delays and soaring costs.

It was a critical cause of the council going bust, after costs rocketed in the wake of a catastrophic failed first attempt at ‘go live’ in 2022.

Now the council has had to confirm it faces another major delay. It says it needs more time to carry out testing and ensure the suite of services is fully functioning before it goes live.

Staff have been told the hoped for new go-live is end of July, but that it could be the autumn. Insiders have said the continued delays and obfuscation were troubling, especially given the huge focus being put on it.

The project has had a dedicated, £1,100 a day commissioner overseeing it for more than two years, Myron Hyrck, who was brought in specifically because of his prior knowledge of Oracle projects like it, while more than 90 external consultants were said to be working on the scheme – yet it was still facing significant problems. The project is currently managed by Philip Macpherson.

Originally said to cost less than £20 million and trigger millions in savings a year by being more ‘efficient’, the project has rocketed exponentially in cost and is now said to have run up bills to date of £171 million. The council had not confirmed that at the time of writing.

The council also claimed the delay would not cost more as a contingency budget – agreed last year of £40m – was already in place and had sufficient funds to meet costs.

In September, it was reported that a vital component of the project – the income management system that ensures that the thousands of payments in and out of the council every week match up with bank records – had been delayed three times. Whistleblowers said that the whole project was ‘a mess’.

As a result, the council called an extraordinary meeting to discuss the failed project. It did not at that time say the go-live of April was in jeopardy.

Sources have said that the mental health impact on staff working in the finance and digital teams had been considerable because of pressures linked to the delayed project. Repeated delays had further damaged morale, especially given the rapid turnover of staff involved in it. The continued failure to have clear deadlines was causing additional stress, they said.

In a statement the council said: “Following a review as part of the ongoing programme management it has been decided to continue on with testing of the reimplementation of the Oracle system. The council’s HR, finance and procurement programme, known as Brindley, will now have a go live date later on in 2026 and not as originally anticipated in April.”

Cllr Saima Suleman, Labour Cabinet Member for Digital, Culture, Heritage and Tourism, has previously been criticised for not having the technical expertise to properly hold the project leaders to account.

She backed the delay saying: “This decision reflects the council’s focus on ensuring that the reimplementation goes smoothly and the programme is successful – prioritising readiness and stability over fixed dates. There is no impact on the running of the current system and services will continue to function as they are now, with colleagues and suppliers still being paid.

“The Brindley programme’s budget included a contingency to accommodate for eventualities such as this. Therefore, this is not adding further cost into the existing budget.

“The council is taking a staged approach to the reimplementation, with independent assurance at agreed checkpoints. We will continue to test whether we are progressing as expected and meeting all the milestones required, as we recognise the importance of getting this programme right.”

Council opposition leader Cllr Robert Alden, Cons, Erdington, said: “Once again, the council’s botched IT rollout is having to be delayed.

With artificial intelligence straining hardware supply, many have experienced rising cloud storage costs, but there’s an even easier way companies can cut costs without shifting vendors.

A new Crown Information Management report has revealed up to 50% of enterprise data sits unused, taking up valuable storage space when it could otherwise be archived.

According to the data, simply removing 100TB of cloud data could save the average AWS Standard storage customer $27,600 per year in fees – a not-so-insignificant sum.

Redundant, Obsolete and Trivial (ROT) information is to blame, here, often filling cloud storage spaces with duplicated, outdated or low-value data. ROT also clutters search results and slows auditing – three in five (62%) workers agree they spend too much time searching for information, per Microsoft’s 2023 Work Trend Index.

With this in mind, a cleaner storage environment could also save workers valuable time, increasing output and improving cost-efficiency.

Not only will removing old data help companies cut costs and boost efficiency, but it could also serve as an important contribution to emission reductions. Electricity consumption for datacenters is set to more than double by 2030 at the current rate.

All of this being said, Crown acknowledged some data retention requirements that are ultimately adding to companies’ storage costs, GDPR being one of them. “Note any narrow legal exceptions, such as keeping records for public interest archiving, research, or statistics, and include the safeguards required,” the report details.

Crown also warns against over-digitising: “Don’t scan everything.” Though digitisation can reduce physical storage, it might not always be the best way to go about retaining information.

Finally, the report advises companies to destroy what they don’t need… responsibly. This refers to the proper recycling of both paper waste and e-waste.

“Most companies I consult with are paying to store and protect information they do not need,” EMEA Digital Director Tim Rushent concluded. “By removing ROT, organisations not only save money – they reduce risk, improve productivity, and shrink their carbon footprint.”