On 11th April 2022, Birmingham City Council finally pressed the ‘on’ button on its new ERP system. Eighteen months later, the local authority declared itself bankrupt, with a £100 million budget overrun and a system that left it unable to produce basic financial statements or even determine if fraud had occurred within its systems.

The Oracle ERP implementation that was originally expected to cost £19 million and modernise the council’s finances has clocked up a bill of more than £123 million and counting, and the system still doesn’t work properly nearly three years after going live. 

It isn’t expected to be fully functional until some time in 2026.

A question that every CIO and operations director is probably asking themselves in light of this IT disaster: could it have been prevented with better tooling?

Grant Thornton’s 66-page audit report, published in February 2025, reveals that Birmingham City Council’s project issues weren’t primarily resourcing problems or technical problems, they were process problems. Communication breakdowns, governance gaps, a lack of visibility into project implementation, inadequate vendor oversight, and insufficient risk management were the main reasons the new IT project cost £100 million more than the council budgeted. 

And those are exactly the types of issues that modern workflow orchestration platforms are designed to prevent.

The IT project failure

The issues began in 2019, when Birmingham City Council decided to replace its ageing SAP system with Oracle’s cloud-based Fusion platform. The business case seemed to make a lot of sense: the existing SAP system was costing the council over £5 million a year, and Oracle’s ERP solution promised significant cost savings as well as improved functionality.

But according to the audit’s findings, which were reported across multiple technology publications, systematic business process issues transformed an IT upgrade into an existential crisis for the council. 

It went live with the new ERP system in 2022 knowing that that system had significant deficiencies. Testing was incomplete because the implementation was too unstable to test properly. Critical risk information was buried in supporting documents rather than being clearly visible to decision makers. Vendor oversight was inadequate, with systems integrator Evosys providing minimal input to crucial programme discussions despite their advisory role.

For 18 months, the council had no audit trail for financial transactions, meaning it couldn’t detect potential fraud across billions in public spending.

And perhaps most tellingly, the audit found that “bad news was not welcome” within the council’s project team, meaning serious concerns weren’t adequately escalated to those who could have prevented the issues from worsening. 

Unfortunately the financial impact extends far beyond the headline £123 million figure. Birmingham now allocates £5.3 million annually just for manual workarounds to keep basic financial operations functioning. Council tax has increased by 7.49% partly to cover the costs. 

The process problem

The council’s IT project primarily failed because of process management issues, which means the right platform could have prevented many of those issues. 

Modern workflow orchestration platforms, which provide advanced process management tools that enable leaders to view, manage and track work across the organisation, could have prevented virtually every issue that derailed Birmingham’s implementation. These process orchestration technologies have already prevented similar IT disasters for other organisations across both the public and private sectors.

Consider, for instance, the communication breakdowns that plagued Birmingham City Council during this project. The audit found that critical concerns about system readiness weren’t reaching steering committee level, either because they were buried in complex reports or because the organisational culture discouraged negative feedback. Workflow orchestration platforms can solve this through automated escalation pathways that ensure critical issues reach appropriate stakeholders regardless of organisational hierarchies or cultural barriers.

When TMF Group implemented their own process orchestration solution in 2019, they achieved a £32 million margin improvement across their global operations. The technology exists, the real question is why more organisations aren’t using it for critical projects.

The governance gaps that allowed Birmingham to proceed with a system that wasn’t ready for production could have been prevented through automated compliance checkpoints that make it impossible to progress without meeting predefined criteria. Instead of relying on human judgment calls under pressure, these systems enforce governance frameworks automatically.

Birmingham’s vendor management issues, where key suppliers weren’t adequately supervised or held accountable, could have been addressed through supplier process orchestration workflows that track deliverables, monitor performance, and automatically escalate when commitments aren’t met.

The technology that could have fixed those processes

The market for workflow orchestration platforms has matured significantly in recent years, with solutions specifically designed for the types of complex, multi-stakeholder projects that Birmingham undertook. Understanding these options provides an insight into how similar IT disasters might be prevented in the future.

Enate is an industry leader when it comes to process orchestration for B2B service delivery organisations. Their process orchestration platform provides what the company describes as “X-ray vision” into an organisation’s operations, offering real-time visibility into project health and the power to manage and track work throughout every phase of the project – insights that could have immediately flagged Birmingham’s readiness issues and helped the council’s project get back on track. 

IBM Business Automation Workflow offers enterprise-grade capabilities specifically designed for complex implementations. Its AI-powered decision-making can automatically identify risks and suggest suitable actions to offset those risks, potentially preventing the escalation of small issues into project-threatening problems.

Microsoft Power Automate’s platform provides cost-effective process automation that integrates seamlessly with existing Microsoft environments. For public sector organisations that are managing tight budgets, it’s an approach that could enable business users to create governance workflows without extensive technical expertise.

ServiceNow excels at managing the technical aspects of large implementations whilst ensuring comprehensive documentation and audit trails. Its change management processes could help projects prevent premature go-live decisions.

Appian combines low-code development with case management, making it valuable for coordinating complex vendor relationships and ensuring accountability throughout implementation processes.

The common thread across all these platforms is their ability to automate workflow management and provide real-time visibility into the progress of that work – all things that Birmingham’s IT upgrade project lacked. 

The resulting bankruptcy

When Birmingham City Council declared bankruptcy, the IT failure wasn’t the sole cause – but it was definitely a major factor. 

In fact, although the council argued that the biggest cause of its bankruptcy was a £700 million equal pay claim, research by the Audit Reform Lab indicated that “the failed IT system was the council’s biggest financial problem, and its budget deficits ‘have little to do with the equal pay issue”.

The consequences of this failed IT project extend far beyond the IT department, with council services having to be cut, staff made redundant, and council tax increased to cover the costs. The human impact of the process management issues with this project now extends throughout the community that the council serves.