Student Loans Company hires performance management system support
Company’s performance has been under fire after document scanning 'meltdown'
By Anh Nguyen | Computerworld UK | Published 10:53, 12 August 10
The Student Loans Company has awarded a contract to Rocela for support services for its performance management system.
Under the three-year contract, worth £365,373, Rocela will manage the support for the SLC's Oracle and Hyperion software systems, with a view to hosting the services.
Specifically, Rocela will provide support for the SLC's Oracle E-Business Suite, which was being managed in-house prior to the contract signing. Rocela is supporting the SLC's back office systems, including HR and financial systems.
"They [the SLC] wanted to focus their own resources in their own operational systems," said Martin Mutch, chief executive of Rocela.
The performance of the SLC has come under a great deal of fire recently, which resulted in the forced resignation of the organisation’s chief executive and chairman, Ralph Seymour-Jackson and John Goodfellow, respectively, in May.
A processing fiasco a year ago left hundreds and thousands of students without finance. The problems began with what the National Audit Office called a document scanning “meltdown” at the SLC, after the system was introduced without full testing, and then failed to work. A backlog of a quarter of a million cases built up, and a separate independent report concluded that the company lacked a formal IT plan.
Nonetheless, the independent report from PricewaterhouseCoopers did note that the SLC had “re-developed” the scanning software, and that it was moving to a service oriented architecture. It said this “should allow the introduction of new services without significant impact on the existing applications”.
