BT Lancashire Services (BTLS) is a wholly-owned company under the BT Group (one of the world’s leading communications services companies). BTLS are responsible for managing the Property and Highways teams for Lancashire County Council’s 10-year £400 million cost transformational scheme.
BT Lancashire Services capital program includes:
- A £600m portfolio of Highways & Property projects
- 3,000 disparate projects
- Grant Bids, Government initiatives and more
“Cora is our single program and project management platform that has increased the level of financial control and enhanced the quality of forecasting for us.”
– Graham Walker
Program Manager, BT Lancashire Services
The Challenge BT Lancashire Services faced
BT Lancashire was previously managing their programs and projects using a number of spreadsheets to collate information spread over 100+ different systems. This disparate system meant that there was a lack of integration and visibility over financials and collating monthly spend reports took 3.5 weeks.
They required one, centralised, system to support the transformation of their asset management program. They needed an intuitive system for both Highway Services (formerly Lancashire Highway Services) and Property that would integrate seamlessly with Oracle to:-
- Deliver end-to-end business processes
- Align the Asset Register with daily service operations around planned, cyclical & reactive maintenance regimes
- Provide a ‘Knowledgebase’ to aid future planning and forecasting
- Inform major policy documents such as TAMP
- Inform the Commissioning process
- Route optimisation to reduce staff and other resource costs
- Meet regulatory, legislative and financial requirements and obligations
- Performance measurement
Cora Capabilities:
Cora PPM was implemented to provide financial visibility over the projects being delivered by the Highways and Property departments. Cora PPM is integrated with the Property Asset Management Systems (Technology Forge), Highways Asset Management System (Symology), and Oracle Financials, providing end-to-end financial visibility of program delivery and associated cost savings.
Benefits:
- Increased visibility and transparency of project costs
- The need for project managers to contact finance to check actual spending on projects has now been removed
- The executive-level team now has instant visibility (via the financial analysis widget) of any over-spend against budget
- Supports the Commissioning team in ‘draw the line’ type decisions – i.e. which projects to move forward within the budget available
- Reporting cycle reduced from 7 weeks to instantaneous
