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Birmingham City Council’s Oracle Fusion programme went live in April 2022 after warnings about readiness, testing and core finance processes. The result was not a simple case of faulty software: key work still required manual intervention, financial data had to be repaired, and the council faced years of stabilisation and reimplementation. The strongest public evidence points to failures in governance, risk management and organisational change around a high-risk ERP replacement.
The programme materially worsened the council’s financial-control problems, but it was not the sole cause of Birmingham’s financial crisis. Equal-pay liabilities, demand pressures, inflation and wider organisational weaknesses also contributed. Grant Thornton’s February 2025 public-interest report identified fundamental programme-management and governance weaknesses, poor understanding of risk, a departure from the plan to adopt Oracle-standard processes, and a culture in which bad news was not communicated effectively.
What Birmingham set out to replace
Birmingham had used SAP for finance, procurement, human resources and payroll since 1999. Over time, the system had accumulated substantial customisation to support the council’s own processes. In 2018, the council reviewed its future requirements and chose Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP and HCM, with the intention of modernising a broad set of finance and people services.
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The business case weighed the continuing costs and constraints of the legacy arrangement against projected savings and the prospect of a cloud-based system. The initial Oracle implementation estimate was about £19 million. Choosing to replace SAP was not, by itself, proof of bad judgment: an ageing, heavily customised system can be costly and difficult to maintain. The central failure was not adequately controlling the risks of changing platform, processes, data and organisational capability at the same time.
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The alternatives included upgrading or migrating SAP, extending the existing arrangement while improving governance and data quality, moving to another ERP provider, or undertaking a phased replacement. No platform choice removes the need for sound data, realistic testing, capable leadership and a credible transition plan.
The shift from adopting Oracle to adapting it
The intended approach was to use Oracle’s standard functionality wherever possible, redesign Birmingham’s processes to fit where appropriate, train staff on the new ways of working and limit custom development. That approach can reduce complexity and make a cloud system easier to maintain.
The programme shifted toward adapting Oracle to reproduce existing Birmingham processes. The council’s June 2023 stabilisation plan described the move away from the original adoption principle. This does not mean all configuration or customisation is wrong. Legal, regulatory or genuinely necessary operational requirements can justify departures from standard functionality. The risk arises when exceptions are accepted without clear ownership, a business case, cost and lifecycle analysis, and adequate testing.
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Recreating legacy behaviour can create a chain of complications: more bespoke workflows and integrations to test, harder reconciliation rules, a larger burden on data migration, and greater difficulty proving that the system works reliably. It also makes “ready” harder to define: a project can appear to satisfy many local requirements while still failing at core tasks such as reconciling bank transactions or producing dependable finance information.
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Warnings did not become effective controls
Reporting by Computer Weekly described concerns before launch, including a 2019 presentation that identified limitations in Oracle’s out-of-the-box bank-reconciliation capability. Concerns also existed about build quality, testing and operational readiness. These reports do not establish that every concern was ignored or that every warning was understood by every decision-maker. They do show why an ERP programme needs a formal way to turn identified risks into decisions.
A risk register is not a control by itself. A functioning risk process identifies the risk, assigns an accountable owner, funds and tests mitigation, assesses residual risk and escalates it to the right decision-maker. For a critical finance process, a known limitation should lead to evidence: a successful test using realistic transaction patterns, a viable workaround with rehearsed staffing and cost, a redesign, or a decision to delay. Recording a risk while continuing toward the planned date does not make the risk safe.
Go-live was a governance decision
Oracle went live in April 2022. A launch decision is not merely a technical milestone; it transfers risk to the people who must run finance, payroll, procurement and services on the system. In Birmingham’s case, the key questions are whether go-live criteria were explicit, which critical defects remained, who could stop the launch, what residual risks were accepted and whether elected members and senior officers understood the operational consequences.
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1Repair Windows errors before they cause bigger problems2Fix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitches3Clear out junk files and repair common Windows errorsGrant Thornton later found that the council did not properly understand the level of risk inherent in the solution. That points to a gap between awareness and action: warning signs may be visible somewhere in a programme, yet fail to reach a decision-maker in a form that prompts a delay or redesign. A timetable can become an implicit priority if governance bodies do not have independent assurance, authority to stop, and a shared definition of readiness.
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Questions every large programme should be able to answer before launch include:
- Have end-to-end tests passed using representative data and transaction volumes?
- Have source and target balances been reconciled and exceptions resolved or formally accepted?
- Can staff complete critical tasks, including payment, collection, payroll and month-end processes?
- Are manual workarounds documented, resourced, costed and rehearsed?
- Have independent assurance findings been closed or explicitly accepted by the correct authority?
- Is there a credible fallback or staged-launch plan if a critical process fails?
What failed in practice
The most consequential reported problems affected finance operations and the ability to trust and use financial information. The council’s stabilisation plan described significant manual allocation of transactions because bank reconciliation did not adequately handle its transaction patterns. Incorrectly posted or poorly reconciled transactions required manual investigation and remediation, and account closure was delayed while staff worked to identify and correct inaccuracies.
Computer Weekly also reported problems involving supplier payments, direct debits, cash collection and visibility of where money had been received or spent. Those details rely in part on the publication’s reporting and insider testimony; they should not be taken to mean every payment or collection failed. The better-supported overall conclusion is that important processes required workarounds and finance staff could not rely on the intended level of automation and control.
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Problems extended beyond finance. Birmingham reported recruitment, data-management and monitoring issues, including DBS-check renewals. Modules intended to help budget holders view or forecast expenditure were delayed or did not work as intended, according to Computer Weekly’s account of the programme. Training alone could not fix unfinished process design, poor data or unreliable controls.
Why management and organisational change mattered
Grant Thornton’s 2025 report identified fundamental weaknesses in governance and programme management, inadequate risk understanding, inadequate business and culture change, and failures to follow the Oracle-standard design principle. It also described a workplace culture in which bad news was not communicated sufficiently. These findings help explain why technical defects became operational problems: the programme did not reliably align the system, business processes, data, staff capability and oversight.
End users were reportedly unprepared and unequipped to use the new system. Effective change management is more than training sessions. It includes redesigning processes, assigning data ownership, clarifying roles and approval authority, updating management reporting and controls, establishing support, and confirming that users can perform their real jobs before launch.
Capability was another risk. As Birmingham brought services in-house after ending its Capita contract in 2019, more than 300 former Capita staff moved into the council, but most were not Oracle specialists. Grant Thornton described the challenge of building internal Oracle capability. Insourcing was not necessarily the cause of the failure, but a skills transition during a major ERP programme demanded a deliberate plan for specialist expertise, knowledge transfer, retention and supplier accountability.
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ERP migration is not simply copying records from one database to another. Organisations need named owners for master data, cleansing rules, source-to-target reconciliation, retention of historical records, continuity of audit trails, realistic volume testing and validation of every downstream integration. Weak data can make a technically successful migration unusable for finance or audit.
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Later reporting continued to raise concerns about data cleansing, resourcing and readiness for reimplementation. Computer Weekly’s coverage of data-cleansing and resourcing issues underscores that remediation can remain difficult even after a programme has moved from initial implementation to recovery. Data readiness should therefore be treated as a core go/no-go condition, not a late-stage technical task.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Cost, financial control and the council’s wider crisis
There is no single figure that can be responsibly labelled “the cost of Oracle” without specifying what is included. The original implementation estimate was about £19 million. Birmingham’s June 2023 plan estimated a total cost near £100 million as stabilisation and corrective work were considered. Later reporting and the public-interest report used different scopes and dates: Grant Thornton said implementation and necessary corrective investment were at least £90 million above the original budget, while subsequent estimates included further reimplementation or related costs. Figures reported in 2026 should not be compared as if they all measure the same thing; some may include future operating costs, support, subscriptions, manual work or remediation.
The financial impact was not just a larger technology bill. Weak reconciliation and delayed account closure reduced confidence in financial data and burdened staff with manual work. That makes budgeting, reporting and audit more difficult. The system failure was a major contributing factor to Birmingham’s financial-control problems, but it did not alone cause the council’s September 2023 Section 114 notice, the formal step indicating it could not balance its finances. Equal-pay liabilities and wider pressures also mattered.
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Recovery and what is confirmed
Birmingham’s response included stabilisation, manual remediation and a reimplementation effort. The council said in a December 2025 commissioners’ update that the Oracle programme remained on track against key deadlines. An official follow-up document in January 2026 addressed lessons from the original implementation and the reimplementation. Those updates indicate progress, not proof that recovery was complete. The available evidence does not establish full completion by August 2026.
Lessons for other ERP buyers
Before procurement
- Compare replacement, upgrade, extended support and phased migration against realistic transformation costs, not just licence or subscription estimates.
- Map critical business capabilities, statutory duties, audit-retention needs and integrations before choosing a platform.
- Establish who owns each data set and who is responsible for cleansing, reconciliation and sign-off.
- Check that the organisation has enough internal programme, finance, data and platform expertise—or a credible plan to acquire it.
During design
- Use an “adopt, configure, customise” framework. Require a documented business case, named owner, cost and test plan for material customisation.
- Distinguish genuine legal or regulatory needs from a preference to preserve familiar processes.
- Agree the target operating model before configuring the software, and design reconciliations, audit controls and reporting early.
- Keep a complete inventory of integrations, exception paths and dependencies.
Before and after launch
- Set hard, measurable go-live criteria, including successful end-to-end tests for payroll, payments, collections, bank files and statutory reporting.
- Reconcile balances and test realistic volumes; run parallel operations when the risk warrants it.
- Prove that users can perform critical work, rather than treating training attendance as evidence of readiness.
- Obtain independent assurance and make explicit who has authority to delay or stop launch.
- After launch, monitor transaction accuracy, reconciliation exceptions and control failures daily. Protect statutory reporting and financial controls first, and do not disguise structural defects as routine stabilisation.
The Birmingham case is not evidence that cloud ERP cannot work for a large public body, nor proof that one vendor alone caused the failure. It is evidence that software selection cannot compensate for weak governance. The decisive safeguard is a programme that can convert known defects into a tested mitigation, a redesign or a decision not to go live.
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