Enterprise resource planning

"Using Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) tools to exploit the new potential to use the whole range of information held by the Council (which by this stage will be entirely electronic and searchable)"

Councils often lack the tools, and the underlying information, to monitor their true performance aganst the coprorate objectives and vision for the future. They tend to focus on recording and measuring the process-related performance measures defined by external bodies such as the Audit Commission, and often, too, actually make the process less effective by focusing too much on these measures.

In the Council of the Future, the information base will be much richer than it is now - all of the Council's information wil be held electronically, and structured in a way that enables it both to be accessed readily, and also to be available for performance monitoring on a regular and routine basis. This means that Enterprise Resource Planning tools can be applied to answer much more fundamental questions than they have in the past - questions such as:

• what does it cost to deliver each of our services end to end?
• how much of the total budget for each service go into the actual service delivered to the customer (and how much to office and professional overheads)?
• what is the quality of the services we offer (as compared to the quantity, which is what traditionall yis measured)?
• how much of our staff resources' time is productive work in delvering services to customers?
• what value is derived from the council's property assets?