FSN: Agresso wins £1.1m University of Southampton contract

Agresso wins £1.1m University of Southampton contract

8th January 2007
The University of Southampton has signed a £1.1 million contract to implement Agresso Business World. The university will replace its current Prophecy accounts package with the financials and procurement modules of Agresso, plus the project and awards functionality to manage its research activities. Go live is scheduled for August 2007.

The University of Southampton has grown significantly over the last decade; trebling in size, opening two more campuses and expanding its research work. It is determined to be seen as one of the top 10 universities in the UK by 2010 so the institution needed a much more powerful business management system to support that aim. The director of finance, Malcolm Ace, said: “We are looking for a step change in functionality. We need a powerful and flexible system with excellent reporting and enquiry capabilities, plus strong workflow processes to enable us to streamline our business operations.”

“We also wanted a system that was easy to use so that both expert finance people and occasional users could extract the data they need quickly and easily,” he added. Agresso won the contract in the face of strong competition from Oracle and SAP following a rigorous evaluation process that included demonstrating some 70 defined problems or scenarios to expert users from the university who marked their performance in ten categories.

“Agresso shone through, coming first in eight of the categories and second in the other two,” explained Ace. “They clearly demonstrated real knowledge of financial management in the HE sector and that they were the best fit for us. But we were also very impressed with their references from outside HE and we are confident they are a partner we'd be happy to work with.”

The University of Southampton is the fifth Russell Group university to select Agresso Business World, which Agresso says makes it the joint most popular finance system amongst this group. Agresso Business World is currently used in more than 50 higher education and research institutions across the UK . In addition, 150 HE and FE sites use the range of specialist post-16 education software developed by Distinction and now under the Agresso banner.

About Us