The Home Office has said it plans to replace its Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system and Business Intelligence (BI) tool, as well as its separate payroll solution, with a new integrated system.

The new system, to be known as Metis, is intended to transform the way the Home Office delivers its back office processes. Metis will comprise a suite of applications which include ERP, customer relationship management (CRM) and human capital management (HCM).  

The procurement for technical integration for a Oracle Fusion based ERP system is expected to be worth £2m, with a contract start date of June 25 this year and ending on December 31 2018.

Details included in a tender document indicate all staff and functional areas are in scope for change, including Home Office HR and finance specialists, around 29,000 end users, including maritime, operational and overseas staff as well as those in the UK, and business processing outsource service provision based in Newport.

The tender says transferring to a cloud-based Software as a Service (SaaS) model will involve moving to modern best practice processes with significant associated business change. Cloud-based SaaS solutions cannot be customised as the previous generation of applications could, so key to achieving benefits will be the effective adoption of the new processes.

The Home Office said it is “strategically committed to cross-government alignment of back office services” and will be “a pathfinder for government” in cloud-based services. It said configuration of the new system will be required to support shared civil service outcomes, and the implementation is part of, and has dependencies with, the overall government roadmap for shared services.

The Home Office said it will conduct a G-Cloud procurement exercise shortly on three inter-related lots.

  • Lot 1 will be for a systems integrator. Acting as a prime supplier, the systems integrator will have overarching responsibility for the success of the programme.
  • Lot 2 will cover functional configuration with the choice of a technical supplier responsible for functional configuration.
  • Lot 3 will target integration, with a technical supplier chosen to be responsible for integration.

A further service management lot is also envisaged, though no procurement actions are planned on that lot in the near to medium term. The Home Office said as it will be making use of G-Cloud, it will get in touch with relevant suppliers as part of or after its long listing process.