Horsham District Council

Moving to TechnologyOne’s OneCouncil SaaS solution has transformed the way Horsham District Council operates, streamlining and automating once manual processes.

“I don’t think we would have progressed this far and changed the cultural habits had we not made the decision to move to TechnologyOne,” Bradley said.

“We’re invoicing 30,000 or so garden waste collection invoices through the system, and have all 400 employees using self-service for booking annual leave and sick leave.

“Because the system has replaced more of the old-fashioned spreadsheet work, we have reduced the size of the accountancy department and therefore made cost savings.”

By adopting a fully integrated solution, the council can now access a single source of truth for all financial and HR-related data in one platform.

“I feel much more confident in the data we’re producing. I trust the information that's coming out of TechnologyOne much more than the old system,” Bradley said.

“We get more time to review, evaluate and change things. It helps you to question ‘why are we doing this, and how can we improve it?’”

Bradley said working with TechnologyOne to both purchase and implement the solution made the council’s transformation easier.

“With some providers, during the tender process, we felt there was often pushback about what the system could do and how they would do it,” he said.

“With TechnologyOne, it was more collaborative: we’d talk about how to best do something, lay out the options, see what worked best in the circumstances and within the system—it felt a lot more agreeable to us.

“Also, being able to go directly to the implementation team means you can have that conversation much quicker and it’s not lost in translation.”

Horsham District Council implemented TechnologyOne’s Financials software in 2017 and added Human Resources to its product suite in 2019.

The project’s success has triggered further consolidation of systems and modernisation plans.

“The finance team has led the way within the Council because we were the first to move from an on-premise system to SaaS and work in a more agile way,” Bradley said.

Becoming ‘a modern and flexible council’ is one of five key goals outlined in Horsham Council’s corporate plan 2019-2023.

“The council has seen that it works, and the IT strategy has caught up—we want to move more of our current systems to SaaS in the future,” Bradley said.

“From my point of view, the fewer systems, the easier it is. Because it's all under one roof, you don't have issues with integration and data transferring backwards and forwards.”

Bradley said that while changing systems was a ‘big upheaval’, the process has helped future-proof Horsham District Council.

“The benefits we're seeing now shows that it’s worth that pain. When it's done in the right way, and with the right system, you get the right results at the end of it,” he said.

“Through my role as the UK Local Government User Group Chair, I’m confident that TechnologyOne will continue to collaborate and ensure our solution evolves to meet the future requirements of the industry.”