Oracle solutions for the public sector (page 1 of 2)

The challenge for public-sector organisations lies in maintaining the right balance between the serviceability of the asset portfolio and the levels of expenditure allocated to purchasing, installing, maintaining and retiring it.

Difficult assets

Efficient management of assets is one of the most critical financial challenges facing public-sector organisations, because of the sheer cost incurred in maintaining and managing the asset portfolio. In many countries, governments are the largest property owners in the land, responsible for housing, schools, offices and public buildings. For many public-sector organisations the purchase, deployment and upkeep of assets is the second largest cost item after payroll.

Asset management in the public sector has traditionally been fraught with inefficiency, due to two mutually influential factors. First, having multiple departments manage a diverse array of assets, often over a wide geographical area, has made it difficult to establish a single, central asset register containing a "single source of truth" about each one.

Secondly, information about assets has not been properly shared between different functions (for example, finance and maintenance) and different organisations (for example, neighbouring local authorities). Different assets and different asset categories (plant, buildings, schools) have been managed in different ways, using different computerised or paper-based systems.

The result is an unwieldy mix of automated and manual processes that prevents government organisations from conducting asset-related activities efficiently, and from gaining meaningful information about their assets.

Enterprise Asset Management

The lack of coherent information makes it very difficult to understand what assets are in place and to plan and budget comprehensively for asset purchases, maintenance and redeployment and disposal. Instead, property, plant and other assets are bought and managed on an ad-hoc, often reactive basis. The cost of asset ownership and management is therefore unpredictable, unnecessarily high and difficult to track, making it hard to demonstrate accountability to taxpayers.

One of the organizations that realized the importance of these challenges and decided to deploy Oracle solutions was the Egyptian Social Fund for Development (SFD). By implementing Oracle's Enterprise Asset Management, SFD improved the management of all maintenance activities and improved procurement and inventory management by deploying Oracle's Purchasing and Inventory Management applications.

Bahrain Government's FMIS (Financial Management Information System) Fixed Assets project is one of the remarkable success stories delivered with Oracle solutions for asset management. Today, 33 Bahrain Government Ministries are managing the entire asset-related business processes that cover capital budgeting, asset requisition and purchasing through the Ministry of Finance in a streamlined way. They have online budgetary control and can manage payments to suppliers, asset registration and inventory item cost accounting and reconciliation of centrally held bank accounts.

Even those organisations that have invested in computerised systems for asset management have found that they do not always live up to expectations. Asset management is closely tied to other functions, such as finance, purchasing, project management, maintenance and citizen services. If the systems that manage these areas are not closely integrated, then inefficiency, duplicate effort and inaccuracies inevitably arise.

Oracle Property Manager

Oracle Property Manager is a fully featured software module that manages property leasing, lease administration (both expense and revenue leases), maintenance, collections and utilisation of space from a central console.