Cambridgeshire County Council

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Cambridgeshire County Council

Fujitsu supplied the consultancy that helped Cambridgeshire to tailor the Projects Module to match their business requirements.

Customer's Challenge

Cambridgeshire County Council (Cambridgeshire) owns land, buildings, schools, libraries, contact centres, social services, county offices and farms that make up their property portfolio.

The data management of this portfolio was labour intensive and susceptible to error despite the best efforts of the Cambridgeshire staff. This was due to many disparate systems and databases and keeping these consistent was a constant challenge. In addition, the disparate systems led to 'islands of information' within the organisation, maintained for different business purposes with no corporate view.

Cambridgeshire wanted to consolidate their property information and improve the project management of property related projects such as the 'Capital Building Programme' and the 'Building Improvement Programme'.

Fujitsu’s Solution

The technology selected to consolidate the information was Oracle 11i eBusiness Suite. Specifically, the Property Manager Module, Projects Module, Fixed Assets Module and Project Connect were used. Additionally, Fujitsu and Cambridgeshire have developed an interface from AutoCAD Drawings (used by architects to design buildings) into Property Manager.

The Property Manager module holds all of the core property information about the buildings and land owned or used by Cambridgeshire County Council. This core property information includes a link to provide a map-based view of any site. In addition, any leases that are managed by the county, either as Landlord or Tenant, are also held within this module. This information allows billing or payment schedules to be built based on the lease conditions and interfaced to the appropriate finance module i.e. Accounts Receivable when the county are landlord and Accounts Payable when they are the tenant. Fujitsu has also provided the technical support necessary to tailor the e-mail milestone alert processing, which is used to 'alert' Estates Officers about major tasks due in the management of the leases. Finally, the Property Manager room data will allow the allocation of space to departments to be done on a more accurate basis and all changes of use will be reflected in the system.

Fujitsu supplied the consultancy that helped Cambridgeshire to tailor the Projects Module to match their business requirements. Particular attention was focussed on the Capital Programme but many other projects within the organisation were created. These projects cover many property related areas but also some non-property areas as diverse as Leased Cars and Highways Vehicle Fleet.

The Projects module is being used with MS Project to manage all property related projects from major capital projects through to small property maintenance projects managed by the council. MS Project is used to manage the project timeline and is then interfaced to the projects module using Project Connect to ensure the task start and end dates are consistent in e-business. All requisitions and orders are entered on e-business purchasing using the appropriate project information. This simple task ensures that all subsequent transactions are recorded against the project as commitments and eventually expenditures.

Each project has a cost budget and where appropriate, a revenue budget. All expenditure, both internal and external, is entered with the appropriate project information. All staff working on a project enter the time spent on each task. Any invoicing to other projects and/or external customers is also done against the project. The entry of all this information provides the project manager with the raw information needed to manage the project to time and cost targets.

The project managers have been provided with a number of standard Discoverer reports and these are used to monitor progress against their cost or revenue budgets. The reports have been added to the project plan to ensure that the project manager has all of the information required to run the project at his/her fingertips. In addition to the reports, the project plan provides a link to a bespoke intranet project viewer. The viewer displays a list of active projects for a given site with summarised information extracted from the ebusiness modules. The final link from the project plan is a link to the GIS system to provide the project manager with a view of the site of the project, to check access etc.

Benefits to our Customer

Getting a definitive list of core property data in Property Manager was a step forward. It took a great deal of tailoring of Property Manager to accommodate all the information required to allocate new site reference numbers. Fujitsu, Cambridgeshire and Oracle staff have developed the structure to support all of the user requirements.

Property Manager holds all of Cambridgeshire's leases in one place managed by a single section using standard procedures. The team is also alerted to future tasks by the milestone processing and can review any payments or billing made against a lease by viewing the Accounts Payable or Accounts Receivable information.

The AutoCAD interface now enables accurate drawings from the architects to be loaded into Property Manger to create rooms that are identical to the original drawings. From this information, Cambridgeshire can work out space charging and allocate people to rooms/space.

The solution also allows capital project costs to be linked to assets using the standard projects interface. For example, when a new school is commissioned or a major addition to an existing school is commissioned then an e-business project is set up to collate all of the costs associated with the construction project. At the end of the project, the construction costs incurred are then used to create/update the Fixed Assets system to reflect the costs of the new school or extension.

“Project costs are also better controlled,” Jim Farnan, PREMIS project manager explains. “For each task on a project we know how many hours each discipline is budgeted to spend. We use timesheets on the Projects Module to record the actual time spent. The projects module allows us to compare the budget to what we actually spent. This has led to better project management and cost control on all projects.”

Farnan continues, “Fujitsu has helped integrate the Oracle e-Business Suite and all the Cambridgeshire disparate tools such as MS Project, AutoCAD and GIS (Geographical Information System).”

Our Approach

Work started October 2001 and took a year from the start to the initial implementation. The project was started after the main financial modules had been implemented and before the HR implementation of the Oracle eBusiness Suite. The project had to be completed and implemented on time to avoid delaying the next phase of the e-business programme.

Data coming from the many sources had to be consolidated and cleansed. This involved information on properties and commitments and expenditure to date for projects. The data then had to be updated, input and set-up in the Oracle eBusiness Suite.

The closing and conversion of data from bespoke and package systems had to be coordinated and carried out in a very controlled manner. This led to the introduction of new business procedures and much support was required during this transition period.

Cambridgeshire staff, helped by Fujitsu, developed their own training courses and materials. The courses covered the basics required to use each module (Projects, Property Manager and Fixed Assets) and then moved on to cover more specific business processing for the respective business areas.

Our Expertise

Fujitsu was the chosen partner for the Oracle e-Business Suite implementation across Cambridgeshire County Council. This decision was based on a competitive tender for the initial implementation of the financial modules and has been extended to include the subsequent projects including PREMIS.

Fujitsu have been awarded the contract to manage Cambridgeshire's e-business infrastructure and software for the next 10 years.