Logica wins £12m council deal

Services company Logica has won a £12m contract to supply HR, payroll and eprocurement systems to the London Borough of Waltham Forest for the next ten years.

The service, due to go live in April 2003, will see Logica host mySAP financials and eprocurement.

The company has also joined forces with HR specialist Pecaso to provide mySAP HR and payroll software, tailored for local government, covering the council's 3,500 staff.

Faced with antiquated payroll and finance systems and a paper-based HR and procurement system, Waltham Forest "needed to get a single view of our data", said Chan Badrinath, the council's executive director of corporate services.

Having made this decision, the council considered software from Oracle, Agresso and SAP. While all promised similar levels of functionality, not all could demonstrate they could deliver on the promises, said Badrinath.

SAP was able to provide local government reference sites where they were running the four systems required. "I didn't want Waltham Forest to be the first to trial it," she said.

Having chosen SAP, the council sought a supplier to implement it. "Logica showed us the work they were doing with Haringey. I liked their approach to implementation and project management," said Badrinath.

Logica won the contract to run Haringey's financial and HR systems last year. As with Haringey, the Waltham Forest service will be hosted from Logica's service centre at Bridgend.

Logica is responsible for upgrading the software during the lifetime of the contract. "Because we carry out a large number of upgrades, we will be able to offer a smooth migration path when we need to upgrade," said David Lawson, enterprise sales director at Logica.