Content

Salford City Council - Record of Decision
 
I Councillor Jack Youd, Deputy City Mayor,
Lead Member for Finance, Support Services and Regeneration, and
chairman of the Procurement Board, in exercise of the powers
contained within the Council Constitution do hereby approve:
 

the extension of the existing contract for
Liquidlogic, move from an on
premise hosted solution to a cloud hostedsolution, as detailed in the table
below:

 

Detail required

Answers

Contract
Reference

Title/Description of
Contracted Service/Supply/Project

Extension of the existing
contract for Liquidlogic,
move from an on premise hosted solution to a cloud
hostedsolution

Name
of Contractor

SystemC

Type of
organisation
(to be supplied by
Corporate Procurement)

Private Limited
Company

Status of
Organisation
(to be supplied by
Corporate Procurement)

Non-SME

Value of Contract Extension
(£)

£608,751.40  full project

Existing Contract
Term

30/09/2019 to 29/09/2024

Extension
Period

30/09/2024 to 29/09/2026

Contact Officer (Name
& number)

Jennifer Mcilquham – 0161
7932356

Lead Service
Group

Service Reform &
Development

Funding
Source

Revenue Budget

Ethical Contractor (EC):
Mayor’s Employment Charter

EC: Committed to sign the
Charter

EC: Accredited Living Wage
Employer

 
The reasons are:
 
Liquidlogic
Extension & Move to Hosted
Liquidlogic &
ContrOCC have been live in Salford City
Council since 2021 after a major implementation to move from the
previous social care legacy system which started in 2020.
 
It is the core statutory Social Care, Early
Help, Safeguarding and Financial case management system used by
Children's Services, Adult Social Care Services, Adults Service,
Public Health and Corporate Services. The system incorporates
essential & statutory information on children, families and
adults supporting essential service delivery.
 
There are portals which allows Salford
residents and other professionals to refer in digitally and this
starts the record within Liquidlogic
giving us a full picture of involvement with individuals, from
point of initial contact through the assessment and planning stages
and then the link between Liquidlogic
and ContrOCC actions payments to all
our providers. Providers also have access to a provider portal
where they can see what they have been paid and expected to be paid
within the next payment run removing the need for paper remittances
to be produced and sent out.[WP1] 
 
Liquidlogic is
also used by 9 of the 10 LA’s in the GM authority giving us
ability to share knowledge and work closely with colleagues from
other LA’s
 
Benefits of taking the 2-year extension:

Liquidlogic is now embedded in the Children and
Adults and Health Directorates and is continually being developed
to better improve processes. Liquidlogic is also part of the Innovate Community
Solutions project. Extending the terms will mean there is no impact
on business areas and in turn benefit the residents of Salford we
serve
To further embed and improve the
application to support the data administration, system usage,
service levels and strategic planning and decision making
To move from Liquidlogic would involve a lengthy and high-cost
procurement process
To move to another system would
involve high capital expenditure to cover the implementation costs.
Liquid Logic Implementation cost was £2,684,099

 
Benefits of moving to Liquidlogic Hosted Solution[WP2] [JM3] :

All the risk of providing a
leading-edge, highly resilient cloud platform with a secure,
dedicated instance resides with SystemC.
Improves our business continuity. In
the event of a cyber compromise Liquid Logic would remain
accessible as it would no longer reside on the SCC network.
The traditional reliance on a highly
skilled and experienced in-house IT workforce is removed (or
significantly reduced) leaving them to focus on more strategic
workstreams rather than the day-to-day technical operation of
Liquidlogic.
Supports SCC Digital Transformation
ambitions by providing agile working and higher quality access for
users and citizens who can access from anywhere using all standard
browsers.
SystemC
offer high resilience availability – 24/7 x 365 days per
year
SystemC
provide all the hardware, software and licences required to run the
application suite to future proof against costly operating system
and database upgrades.
SystemC
provide industry leading security around the application and our
data, built on the UK based Microsoft Azure platform to leverage
all the benefits of this multi-accredited provider with our own
security processes and services wrapped around NCSC Cloud Security
Principles
Risk around regular hardware and
software patching shifts to SystemC
along with hardware maintenance and upgrades with virtually no
impact on the user.
Salford will benefit from tried and
tested Disaster Recovery processes based in part on proven
deployment processes, further reducing the requirement on Council
infrastructure and thus saving money.
All upgrades bring with them the
latest security patches and protections regardless of when they are
installed ensuring the platform attracts the highest levels of
security and protection.
SystemC
elastic infrastructure has the scalability to reduce impacts of
peaks or troughs in service demand, which could otherwise impact on
user experience or business critical processes.

The recommendation is to continue with Liquidlogic after the 2-year extension period as
there is no desire from the business to move away from Liquidlogic after this period, but rather to expand
the use where there is a clear benefit to do so, via additional
modules such as EYES (Early Years Education System) which would
replace an existing separate system used by the People Directorate
giving us one single solution for Adults and Children.
 
As part of DDaT
business continuity, the Cyber Security Strategy and the ongoing
support of statutory and high-risk applications, DDaT are migrating systems, where possible, to
cloud solutions to limit the impact on our services should Salford
City Council ever be cyber compromised.
 
Moving this application to a hosted solution
will allow DDaT to decommission servers
in our data centre which currently host Liquidlogic. Removing these servers will not only
reduce our costs it will also reduce our carbon footprint The
saving on decommissioning servers in our data centre would be
around £450,250.00.
 
Cost
 

 
Description

 
Costs 24/25

 
Costs 25/26
 

 
Annual Support and Maintenance
 

 
£169,315.96
 

 
£174,395.44

 
Implementation Costs (one of cost)
 

 
£72,260.00

 
n/a
 

 
Hosting costs
 

 
£132,390.00

 
£132,390.00

 
Total Cost for
24/25

 

£373,965.96
 

 

£306,785.44
 

 
Options considered and rejected were:
 
Liquidlogic
Extension & Move to Hosted
 

Continue as it

Continue with the current support and
maintenance costs. The current annual cost is £144,384.43.
This will increase each year based on the RPI rate which for 24/25
was 11.4%. The uplifted rate for 2024/25 is shown below.
 
The total cost per annum to remain as is would
be:
 

Liquidlogic
Support & Maintenance
 

£169,315.96

VM Ware licence

£100,000.00 Estimate

Server & Data Centre Costs

£150,000.00 Estimate

Data Storage

£200,000.00 Estimate

Total

£619,315.96

 
2         
Migrate the application to the SCC Cloud.
We would continue with the current support and
maintenance costs. The current annual cost is £144,384.43.
This will increase each year based on the RPI rate which for 24/25
was 11.4%. The uplifted rate for 2024/25 is shown below.
 
To move to SCC’s cloud environment, we
would need Consultancy support from SystemC to look at configuration changes around IP
address etc. This would come at a cost of £1,300.00 Per day,
we estimate we would need 5 days
 

Liquidlogic
Support & Maintenance

£169,315.96

LL Consultancy cost for Migration (one of
cost)

£6,500.00

Cloud Costs
 

£177,202.86

Total with one off
costs

£353,018.82

Total Per Annum

£346,518.82

 
Assessment of risk:
Liquidlogic is an
essential tool, heavily embedded in SCC People Services. Moving the
system to a hosted cloud-based solution will protect the system and
impact on the service should Salford City Council ever be cyber
compromised.
 
The source of funding is:
The current annual support and maintenance
contract for Liquidlogic is
£144,384.43 and is funded by the DDaT People Budget, C1028. This is increasing by
£24,931.53 to £169,315.96 per annum.
 
The Cloud Hosting costs are an additional
£132,390.00 per annum.
 
Year one will also include a one-off
implementation cost of £72,260.00.
 
The year one total increase is
£229,581.53.
 
From year 2 the annual cost will be
£306,785.44, this is an increase of £162,401.01 based
on the current support and maintenance contract.
 
DDaT have actively
identified costs savings across the whole DDaT function to progress this work[MC4] [JM5] [CM6]  to fund the additional cost. These include
reduction in on premise data centre storage, oracle cloud licences
and VMWare licences.
 
It is allowable within the contract extension
rules to incur additional costs over and above the original
contract value, as long as the additional cost is no more than 50%
of the original contract value.
 
The additional cost for cloud hosting would be
£337,040.00 which comprises of £72,260.00 one off
implementation and 2 x hosting cost of £132,390.00.
 
Liquidlogic
Costs
 

 
Description

 
Costs 24/25

 
Costs 25/26
 

 
Annual Support and Maintenance
 

 
£169,315.96
 

 
£174,395.44

 
Implementation Costs (one of cost)
 
 

 
£72,260.00

 
n/a
 

 
Hosting costs
 

 
£132,390.00

 
£132,390.00

 
Total Cost for
24/25

 

£373,965.96
 

 

£306,785.44
 

 
Legal advice obtained: Supplied by Tony Hatton
 
Financial advice obtained: Supplied by Joanne Garvin &
Stephen Thynne
 
Procurement advice obtained: Supplied by Emma
Heyes
 
HR advice obtained: N/A
 
Climate change implications obtained: Obtained
by Michael Hemingway
 
Documents used: N/A

Contact details
Contact Officer:        Jenny Mcilquham
Telephone number: 01617932356
 

The Lead Member has been consulted
and is supportive of the proposed contract.
The appropriate
Scrutiny Committees to call-in the decision is the Health and
Adults Scrutiny Panel and/or the Overview and Scrutiny
Board.

 
 
 
Signed: Councillor Jack Youd
Deputy City Mayor, Lead Member for Finance,
Support Services and Regeneration Dated: 9 September
2024
 
 
*          
This decision was published on 12th September 2024
*          
This decision will come in force at 4.00 p.m. on 19th September 2024 unless it is
called-in in accordance with the Decision Making Process
Rules.
 

I think the payment runs are via Controcc
not LL (LAS) - and I think this also extends to the external view
for providers?? [WP1]

Can I check if there are issues re NCA
staff accessing via the Cloud? [WP2]

 [JM3]@Walsh, Paul it wont have any
affect on end users internal are external - we will simply change
the URL’s but users wont see this ??

 [MC4]Not sure what we are
saying here? This is where we need to spell out - current costs and
budget are £x….then going forward (leaving out one off
implementation costs) the annual cost will be £x...therefore
a difference of £x. Then are we saying that savings have been
identified that fund the difference?

 [JM5]@Cannon, Miranda have given more
explanation and break down - does this make it clearer?

yes [CM6]