London Borough of Southwark: ERP Readiness and Transformation Support
The Challenge
London Borough of Southwark was preparing to replace its legacy SAP system and recognised the need to position the ERP programme within the context of its wider organisational transformation ambitions. The Council required independent, experienced support to understand its current (‘AS IS’) position, clarify future ambitions, and develop a high-level roadmap that aligned transformation outcomes, delivery timescales, and procurement activity.
The challenge was to ensure that the ERP replacement was not treated as a technology-led exercise, but instead reflected the Council’s broader ambitions across people, process, and culture, while providing a robust foundation for the pre-procurement phase.
Our Approach & Solution
Newtrality operated in an independent advisory role, working closely with Council stakeholders to establish a clear understanding of business readiness and future-state ambition ahead of the ERP pre-procurement exercise.
We supported the Council to define its current (‘AS IS’) position and developed an action plan for improvement, ensuring that known gaps and dependencies were identifiedearly. Through structured stakeholder engagement and targeted analysis, we worked with the Council to articulate a clear set of transformation ambitions across support services, alongside a high-level view of the timescales required to deliver them.
Alongside this, we provided oversight of the wider organisational changes required to enable successful ERP implementation, including implications for business processes and organisational culture. This ensured that the emerging roadmap reflected both technical readiness and the non-technical enablers critical to delivery success.
The Impact
The work resulted in a clear, high-level transformation roadmap, setting out short, medium, and long-term ambitions and the sequencing required to achieve them. This provided the Council with a robust framework for decision-making and a clear set of evaluation criteria, directly informing the development of its ERP procurement specification.
As a result, the Council entered the procurement phase with increased clarity on its requirements, improved alignment between technology and transformation objectives, and greater confidence in its readiness to deliver change.
Client’s Testimonial
“We engaged Newtrality to understand our business readiness for a new ERP and our future ambitions across a number of support services. The Newtrality team were knowledgeable, engaging and thorough in their evaluation of the service cultures and provided us with robust outputs which have fed into our requirements for a new ERP.”
Clive Palfreyman