Issue - meetings

Report of the Executive Director – Corporate Services and Commercial

The Cabinet considered the report of the Executive Director Corporate Services and Commercialseeking approval to undertake procurement activity using the Crown Commercial Services (CCS) framework to place a direct award for the SaaS HR and Payroll system, iTrent. The Preferred procurement option would be to place a direct award with the subcontractor Softcat using the CCS Framework under RM6194. This option would provide service continuity, would give continued stability to the service, and would permit existing development work to continue following the corporate plan to increase managers self-sufficiency and drive automation and a self-service model of service delivery.

Decision Made:

That procurement be made by direct award with the subcontractor Softcat using the CCS Framework under RM6194.

Reasons for the Decision:

The HR and Payroll software was used across the whole Council and by all employees. As such a system of this scale and complexity should only be considered for change once in a generation to ensure that the best use and development opportunities were exploited. By utilising a direct award this enabled ongoing development and growth to continue and avoided a lengthy and costly procurement, implementation retraining and redevelopment process. The existing contract was coming to an end in December 2024 and following a review of alternative systems available, using the G-Cloud procurement route, the incumbent was still considered to be the most suitable solution to meet Sefton’s requirements and was considerably cheaper than comparative suppliers.

Alternative Options Considered and Rejected:

Using the G-Cloud framework, evaluations had been made to consider alternative suppliers who were able to provide a solution with the functionality and scale required by Sefton and these were  shown to be substantially more expensive.

A full OJEU compliant procurement exercise was also considered, opening the opportunity up to all potential bidders. This option was rejected as there was insufficient time or available resource to complete a full procurement exercise and would therefore prove extremely costly and open to risk.