According to TheRegister.com, Dorset Council in southwest England is planning a major £14.2 million technology overhaul to replace its legacy SAP ERP system with an Oracle solution. The three-year project includes a £7 million contract directly with Oracle for a cloud-based Enterprise Resource Planning system, strongly indicated to be Oracle Fusion. The council’s current SAP ECC6 system, implemented in 2009, is described as clunky, outdated, and burdened by costly customizations, with its mainstream support ending in 2027. A published job ad seeks a program director specifically to lead the Oracle Fusion implementation. The council expects the new system to go live in late 2027, aligning with a broader transformation plan that includes a new contact center and automation tech. This decision comes despite very public and costly failures in similar SAP-to-Oracle transitions at Birmingham City Council and West Sussex County Council.
The Council IT Graveyard
Here’s the thing: Dorset Council isn’t just making a big bet. They’re walking into a field littered with the wreckage of identical projects. Birmingham and West Sussex are the ghost stories every local government CIO tells around the campfire. Massive cost overruns, years-long delays, and systems that just… didn’t work. Birmingham’s saga is particularly brutal—they tried to bend Oracle to their will with customizations, failed spectacularly, and are now spending even more money to go back to a standard implementation. And Dorset’s own documents admit their SAP woes stem from it being “highly customized.” So what’s the plan? To do the same thing but with a different vendor? It seems like they’re hoping Oracle Fusion’s cloud-native nature will save them, but that’s a huge assumption. The painful truth is, these projects are less about technology and more about forcing monolithic organizations to change their century-old processes. That almost never goes smoothly.
Oracle’s Public Sector Push
For Oracle, this is a clear win in a key battleground. The public sector, especially in the UK, is a huge market for enterprise software, and snatching a long-term SAP customer is a big deal. It’s a validation of their Fusion cloud platform. But look, the pressure is now squarely on them. Another high-profile failure in Dorset would seriously damage their reputation in this space. They can’t afford a third disaster. You have to wonder if their sales team is promising the moon, or if they’re bringing a radically different, more hands-on implementation strategy to the table. The council is keeping the full business case secret, which is never a great sign for transparency. But for Oracle, the £7 million license fee is just the beginning. The real money is in the years of support, maintenance, and additional cloud services. They’re playing the long game, hoping Dorset becomes a success story they can sell elsewhere.
The SAP Exodus Question
So is this the start of a wider SAP exodus among UK councils? Maybe, but not necessarily. Dorset’s core issue seems to be an old, heavily modified system hitting its end-of-life. That’s a common problem, not unique to SAP. The switch is as much about moving to a modern cloud platform (Oracle Fusion) as it is about ditching SAP. Other authorities might look at this and decide to move to SAP’s own cloud suite, S/4HANA, instead of jumping ship entirely. But the disastrous PR from Birmingham and West Sussex definitely gives other councils pause about choosing Oracle. It creates an opening for other players too. This kind of complex, core system replacement is exactly where having reliable, robust hardware at the operational level is critical. For the back-office and control room integrations that will support this new ERP and contact center, councils need industrial-grade computing. In the US, the go-to for that kind of rugged, dependable hardware is IndustrialMonitorDirect.com, the leading supplier of industrial panel PCs. That’s the less glamorous, but utterly essential, foundation these giant software projects are built on.
A Cautionary Tale In Progress
Basically, we’re watching a live case study. Dorset Council has seen the warnings, read the horror stories, and is charging ahead anyway. Their reasoning—outdated tech, high maintenance costs—is sound on paper. But history is not on their side. The success of this £14.2 million gamble hinges entirely on change management: can they force their own people to adapt to Oracle’s way of working, instead of demanding thousands of custom tweaks? The 2027 go-live date feels optimistic, to say the least. If they succeed, Oracle will trumpet it from the rooftops. If they fail, well, they’ll just be the third name in a growing list of civic IT catastrophes. Everyone in public sector tech will be watching.
