21st November 2005 DFID, the Department for International Development, has appointed Agresso as the lead implementation partner for the £11 million ARIES project to replace its activities reporting and e-information system. Agresso will head a consortium of companies to support DFID in redesigning its management information system (MIS) coding structure and rationalising its underlying IT systems to meet the department's financial, procurement, reporting and performance management needs.
The key to ARIES lies in replacing DFID's numerous, disparate legacy systems with the integrated financial, procurement and project costing and billing modules of AGRESSO Business World 5.5 in a five year implementation, licensing and support contract worth £6.5 million.
Agresso's business information system will be enhanced by a suite of strategic procurement applications from its partner Alito that together will offer DFID an unrivalled end to end e-procurement capability. he two systems interface seamlessly to provide supplier, sourcing and contract management through to purchase order processing, invoice management and payment.
In addition, HELM will provide ARIES with business process change management consultancy and another Agresso partner, Optimum, is responsible for end user training on the new systems.
DFID leads the British government's fight against world poverty and has three UK offices employing 1400 staff, plus more than 1500 people in 69 offices around the world from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe . DFID also has a presence in 23 UK embassies mainly in eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union . The AGRESSO Business World and Alito applications will be installed on servers in the UK and delivered to the global locations via satellite.
Agresso has established a dedicated ARIES programme manager and team with the specialist technical infrastructure skills to ensure the large and complex implementation is delivered on time and to budget. The UK offices will go live by April 2007 with roll out to the rest of the world by April 2008.
Gordon Alexander, DFID's ARIES project manager, said: "We liked the consistent look and feel of the AGRESSO Business World modules which are all web-based. It appears to be a flexible solution with strong reporting capabilities, high quality data capture and good accessibility of information."He added: "Very importantly, AGRESSO scored highly on the intensive performance testing we carried out across our communication links, even low bandwidth satellite to some of our more remote locations."
John Crooks, managing director of Agresso in the UK , said: "This is an extremely prestigious project and we are very proud to be implementation partner for an impressive consortium. Agresso, Alito and HELM all have very strong public sector customer bases and this DFID contract proves our suitability to deliver a large and complex solution for a global organisation with very demanding information management and reporting requirements."
