Case Study: Dumfries & Galloway Council Integra Centros

The Customer

Dumfries and Galloway are one of 32 unitary council areas of Scotland and is located in the western Southern Uplands. It covers the historic counties of Dumfriesshire, Kirkcudbrightshire, and Wigtownshire, the latter two of which are collectively known as Galloway. With over 7000 employees and 1600 Integra users the council have used the software for over 10 years.

The Challenge

As part of their strategy to outsource the management of applications, Dumfries and Galloway Council wished to remove the overhead of running their finance system inhouse. The council already had Integra 2 as on premise manage service application and as part of the project wanted to modernise both the application and the way it was delivered. With a lack of inhouse resource the organisation had found it difficult to find support within the organisation to deal with technical issues.

Cloud Hosting

Dumfries and Galloway Council have taken advantage of a cloud hosted approach, this not only provides the Council with a scalable and cost-effective solution, but also future proofs any upgrade to their system and infrastructure as it is hosed on an Azure platform , which enables changes to be made without local IT resources.
With an improved finance system and a removal of needing in house expertise to run the software, the new Integra Centros hosted solution, which has been optimised for the cloud, has delivered not only functional benefits in improved task allocation, but a better way of running the application as a cloud-based solution.

Improved Support

There is also the benefit allowing the Service desk to access the server directly, which is helpful and speeds up the resolution of helpdesk calls which are speedily resolved.
‘Lindsay said ‘I have been under resourced for quite some time. And if there were any local issues, I’m trying to get somebody in it to progress it, this caused quite a lot of delay with getting that resolved and getting us back in online. ‘ ‘Now it’s a hosted service we can log a call with the service desk and 99% of them are looked at within the hour. And a lot of them are resolved, certainly that day or very soon after. ‘ ‘So, we’re quite happy with it the way that’s going forward and I think we’ve all start to see the benefits realised.’

Improved Upgrading Process

Lindsay Nairn, Billing & Payments Team Leader. Says ‘The real benefits of a hosted system are being able to get IBSS to upgrade and enhanced modules with new releases, at a time that suits us’ When asked what he thinks of Integra Centros Lindsay said ‘my role within the organisation is I’m the manager of the billing, ordering and payments team. So that’s specifically in relation to the Purchase Ledger and Sales Ledger modules and their associate modules. ‘I like the system. I think it works well, particularly my modules I think are really quite effective.’