Teamsolve become London Borough of Lewisham’s trusted end-to-end Oracle specialist
London Borough of Lewisham is one of the largest authorities within the inner-London area. With around 250,000 citizens and 4500 staff, availability, security and performance of its mission critical systems is paramount.
SunGard’s Vivista business unit, part of SunGard Public Sector, is an established, leading information and communication technology and business support company with clients spanning the UK’s public sector.
SunGard Vivista won a major contract to manage London Borough of Lewisham’s IT infrastructure and were seeking an end-to-end Oracle specialist with expertise across Oracle technology and applications.
Said Andrew Parsons, SunGard’s Contract Manager for London Borough of Lewisham, “SunGard Vivista’s experience of Teamsolve is excellent. Teamsolve are clearly specialists in the Oracle arena and this is combined with strong support process and procedures. Events as simple as patching are planned, communicated and all risks and issues fully documented. All of this ultimately makes for an impressive interaction and confidence in the work undertaken.
“The foundations this has built has lead to an extension in the scope of the contract to the mutual benefit of all parties. In fact, SunGard Vivista’s experience of working with Teamsolve has been so positive they are now positioned within our business as the default partner to work with on any Oracle opportunities.”
Teamsolve began supporting London Borough of Lewisham’s Oracle Financials, Swift Social Care and Delphi Millenium Payroll systems – as well as the underlying database Oracle 9i in September 2006. With expertise spanning both applications and technology, Teamsolve were ideally placed to proactively manage and support all Oracle environments.
With support extending beyond Lewisham’s core business hours of 8.30am – 5.30pm, coupled with proactive monitoring of their environments, London Borough of Lewisham are guaranteed peace of mind that their systems are highly available.
Said Sally Chin, Lewisham’s Acting Group Manager – Systems “Knowing that we can pick up the phone if there is a problem and talk to a named member of staff that we know and trust is very reassuring.“
As well as supporting their systems, Teamsolve has become the trusted Oracle advisor for London Borough of Lewisham’s environment to both SunGard and directly to the Authority.
Teamsolve have further supported Lewisham, providing both functional and technical consultancy on a range of projects:
- Oracle iProcurement: Throughout the implementation and roll-out of iProcurement – Oracle’s e-procurement solution – Teamsolve acted as Lewisham’s internal project team’s trusted Oracle Advisor. Following a successful rollout, SunGard and Teamsolve are now preparing to take over support of the iProcurement system ensuring it provides the council with a robust and secure buying platform.
- Construction Industry Scheme: This sets out the rules for how payments to construction subcontractors must be handled. This required both technical and functional consultancy to integrate with the Oracle Financials Accounts Payable module.
- Swift: Further technical work was also required on Lewisham’s Social Care System, Swift, to enable their test and live environment to be separated from the same server. Sharing the two environments on one server could potentially result in data loss, therefore an additional database was set up to split the live and test environments to ensure availability of data should one server fail.
Sally Chin said, “We have been impressed by Teamsolve’s expertise and knowledge of Oracle. A close working relationship with an Oracle specialist helps us protect our current Oracle investment and plan how we can extend them to continue to better serve our business and wider community”.
