Local Government Reorganisation: Why Your ERP Decision Is the Most Important One You'll Make

What Section 151 Officers Need to Consider Early

The instinct in many merger programmes is to focus on technology selection. But the decisions that determine whether an ERP programme succeeds or fails are rarely about the technology itself.

Systems and data are the first challenge. Merging councils bring incompatible data structures, overlapping contracts, and integrations that were never designed to talk to each other. Before any implementation begins, Section 151 Officers need clear answers to foundational questions: What is the system of record for finance? For HR? What data standards will apply? What does migration look like, and what gaps exist in data quality right now?

Alongside migration planning, councils should establish a common master data model covering organisation structures, cost centres, chart of accounts, employees, suppliers and reporting hierarchies. Decisions made here will shape financial transparency and operational performance for years to come. Cyber resilience, security, and business continuity should also be considered core ERP requirements, since consolidating multiple legacy systems into a modern SaaS platform can reduce security exposure, improve compliance, and support operational resilience.

Processes are the second consideration. Finance processes - budgeting, reporting, procure-to-pay - vary across organisations that have evolved independently for years, as do workforce models and HR practices. The new authority needs to decide where it will standardise and adopt next practice and where service complexity or regulatory requirements demand a different approach. Attempting to harmonise processes after go-live, rather than before, is one of the most common and costly mistakes in ERP programmes.

People and governance are the third, and arguably the most important. Clear decision ownership is not a nice-to-have. The Section 151 Officer and the Transformation or Programme Director need to be aligned, empowered, and visible throughout. Workforce alignment and change management are not workstreams you bolt on at the end; they are the mechanism through which the entire programme succeeds or fails. The hard truth is that most ERP programmes fail not because of technology, but because of people, process misalignment, and integration complexity that was underestimated from the start.

Done well, LGR is not just an administrative restructure. It is a genuine catalyst for transformation, one that rarely presents itself twice. A new unitary authority has the opportunity to build a single, modern platform from scratch: shared services that reduce duplication, financial and operational insight that spans the whole organisation, and automation that frees up staff to focus on the work that matters. The councils that use LGR to make a deliberate platform choice, rather than defaulting to legacy, will be best placed to benefit.