Debra Lilley, Oracle alliance director for Fujitsu in the UK, was speaking at Oracle OpenWorld this week in San Francisco and outlined the benefits of the implementation.

Oracle and Fujitsu began working with DWP in 2005, when the department had five core service lines, which were all running on separate systems. It had a separate accounting system, employee services system, debt management system, resolution of payments system and a purchase to pay system.

At the time it took 4,500 people to run these services. However, since consolidating into one single instance of E-Business Suite, DWP has managed to increase the number of service lines it has and simultaneously reduce the amount of staff running them to 1,300.

It had been previously running its systems across 24 physical sites; it now operates on just five. DWP is currently using version 11.5.10, but is in its R12 upgrade and adding performance management software, Hyperion, this month.

In 2009 DWP also started selling this as a shared service to the Cabinet Office, which was shortly followed by the DfE in 2010.