CCCC16A40 - Provision of Finance Systems Future Strategy Workshops

Descriptions

The MoD has a significant Oracle footprint e.g. throughout Finance, Military and Civilian Personnel systems. This has been implemented organically over a number of years through a series of incremental, mainly stand alone, projects. This has led to a footprint that is segmented over several sets of hardware, which means that business process flows are inherently dependent upon a large amount of interfaces which impact the smooth flow of data through the system and add unnecessary complexity. The approach taken to date meets business requirements, though as the eBusiness Suite (eBS) is spread across disparate servers there has been limited ability to utilise the Commercial off the Shelf (CotS) workflow through the integration of eBS. The net result of the current deployed architecture is that there are inefficiencies in the use of applications and therefore in business process. The release 2 of Contracting Purchasing and Finance (CP&F) on 20th October 2016 will span the Finance and Procurement applications estate. This will create opportunities, both to improve Business Process flows through CotS workflow and also System Data flows through CotS integration. Please note that HR and Payroll will remain on their own hardware and continue to provide finance related transactions (e.g. accounting impact of staff costs) to the DFMS. The Planning, Budget and Forecasting (PB&F) process is mainly supported by Enterprise Planning, COGNOS functionality. The PB&F application is large and complex, and there are many “off-system” processes (e.g. Excel), that support the application. In addition the business process that PB&F supports is complex with many hand-offs between Head Office, and other MoD Departments. This in turn compounds the issues created by an over complex application. Director General Finance has established a Finance Transformation Programme to review the existing finance business processes and identify improvements. The Financial Management Strategy aligns to industry best practise that the Department should seek to continually improve the finance systems in incremental steps to deliver the improvements in the business process flows.