Digital innovation and cloud migration, without the disruption
Many UK police forces have been running Oracle’s E-Business Suite to manage their Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) for over a decade. Over its lifetime, the system has become core to these forces’ mid and back-office operations, finely tailored through significant investment and well-established business processes.
However, this isn’t the full story. The rapid pace of digital innovation and changes in national policing strategy are prompting IT departments to re-evaluate what they need to future proof their operations.
After years of investment in an ERP system integral to their operations, how can police forces access the impressive benefits offered by cloud-based working without causing significant disruption to their teams and the efficient business they run?
This was the core challenge which we addressed for Cleveland Police.
The challenge
In 2020, Cleveland Police were undergoing a significant amount of change. Oracle E-Business Suite was approaching the end of its Premier Support coverage, a burning platform that was critical to the force’s operations.
Cleveland had to address this and knew that it was both a local and national strategic imperative to move to the cloud. They needed a practical and pragmatic approach that would achieve this goal while minimising disruption and risk, winning the hearts and minds of 2700 users.
The approach
Together, Oracle and Sopra Steria developed a pragmatic, structured methodology for migrating the Cleveland Police Force operations onto Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), with minimal risk and disruption to key operations.
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure for Policing
Re-engineering all of your business processes isn’t always possible for busy forces balancing the demands of day-to-day policing with competing business change programmes. Our migration to OCI for Policing provided a pragmatic, secure step towards cloud-based working.
This templated approach focusses on the security aspects as a priority and covers Finance, HR, Payroll and Duty Management Systems in a scalable, highly available and high-performance environment.
The OCI for Policing is built for forces seeking higher performance agility, with lower costs and an easier cloud migration path for their existing on-premises applications.
In production, OCI for Police is designed to protect customer workloads with a security-first approach across compute, network, and storage—down to the hardware. It’s complemented by essential security services to provide the required levels of security for the most business-critical workloads.
Using this approach, Oracle in partnership with Sopra Steria, delivered the first OCI migration project of its kind in UK policing. This has enabled Cleveland Police to access a host of benefits and successfully move and improve their ERP system.
The outcome
Here’s what our client said about the positive impact on efficiency, security and how the investment has enabled the force to focus on making more improvements in the service they provide.
“Over the last few years, Cleveland Police have undergone a huge amount of change. It was imperative that we had an up-to-date system but one that gave our staff stability in that they didn’t have to change the processes and procedures, which we would have had to have done if we hadn’t implemented the cloud migration route. We’re also now able to look forward and plan ahead much more effectively and provide the right support for our teams to meet our objectives. We’re also at the forefront of system upgrades, protecting us against cyber-attacks” (Jo Gleeson, Chief Financial Officer, Cleveland Police)
“To deliver such a transformative change, on time and within budget, and provide an optimal user experience for our officers and staff and deliver it seamlessly, from one Friday to the following Monday, is an outstanding achievement. The move has enabled us to improve our back-office systems, making them more efficient so we can invest our limited funds on our front-line service delivery.” (Ciaron Irvine, Chief Superintendent, Cleveland Police)
“We haven’t invested in a platform or a piece of technology. We’ve invested in a partnership with Oracle and Sopra Steria. They understand our world, our challenges and what’s important to the organisation.” (Oliver Plumpton, Head of IT, Cleveland Police)
About Sopra Steria
Sopra Steria, a European leader in consulting, digital services and software development, helps its clients drive their digital transformation. With 47,000 employees in 30 countries, the Group places people at the heart of everything it does to build a positive future.
A long history of providing major operational systems to the public safety market has placed Sopra Steria at the forefront of understanding user requirements and providing solutions that use the best combination of technologies to meet the business needs of its customers.
At Sopra Steria, we understand the complex environments in which our clients operate and the unique challenges they face. We have extensive experience across the policing sector and have been a trusted partner to our clients for over 35 years.
Our team of security accredited experts will work with you to deliver a seamless migration of your infrastructure and applications, leveraging the latest tooling and best practice techniques.
Deploying our tried-and-tested transformation methodology enables a smooth journey to cloud. Throughout the process, we deliver bespoke security assurance to minimise your risk, considering security architecture, security during transition, security of data, cyber security and system controls.
Author:
Paul Bergin, Managing Director, Public Safety Group, Sopra Steria
Georgie Morgan
Georgie joined techUK as the Justice and Emergency Services (JES) Programme Manager in March 2020, then becoming Head of Programme in January 2022.