Sera Neon

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the head of the HR and financial systems team at a public sector local government organization. I’m responsible for supporting and developing our HR financial systems and implementing new ones as well.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Sera Neon?

We wanted to implement the Oracle Cloud integrated systems with our legacy finance and HR system for a huge project. We had a massive program with several modules that we replaced, which we worked on for 4 years.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Sera Neon’s contribution to the project involved designing, configuration, and development of different modules and reports, along with testing, training, and going live. We went live with the site’s HR planning module in August 2017, the ERP module in December 2018, the planning and budgeting module — called PVCS — in March 2019, and the contracts module in November 2020.

More recently, we went live with the payroll, auto supplier, and automated invoice processing module in January 2021. Throughout 2019, we also rolled out different functionalities.

What is the team composition?

We’ve worked with three consultants from Sera Neon’s team working on different reports.

How did you come to work with Sera Neon?

We submitted a request for consultants and got around three different proposals. We selected Sera Neon based on their experience.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent around £180,000 (around $248,000 USD).

What is the status of this engagement?

The contract with Sera Neon was from October 2017–March 2019. At the moment, they’re only providing support for the reports that they developed, and if there are any new requirements, we just ask them.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

We tracked Sera Neon’s impact through testing their reports, examining the issues we came up with, and taking note of the problem we worked on live. Some of the reports were very complex and needed to be emailed to about 50 schools. Although it took a long time to develop the reports, they have been working generally very well. They’ve been tested and all the issues have been fixed —  we haven’t required a lot of support on them.

How did Sera Neon perform from a project management standpoint?

Sera Neon was working as part of the overall program, so we had a program manager and project leads that were managing their team. They had delivery dates for the reports, and generally, they were able to deliver the reports for specific phases of the program as required.

What did you find most impressive about them?

The most impressive thing was Seara Neon’s flexibility, in terms of the changes that we needed to make. Users kept changing the requirements, and their team was patient enough to deal with them and made sure they delivered what the users wanted in the end.

Are there any areas they could improve?

They probably haven’t done work for local authorities before and didn’t appreciate the level of complexity at the start of the project. Therefore, when they got the initial requirements, they didn’t ask as many questions as they should have. 

They needed to spend more time understanding the requirements for the development of the reports because they take longer to amend once they’ve been developed. I’m sure with experience, they can improve on that.