Background

With the Liquidlogic children’s and adults’ social care case management systems well embedded at the Council, Rochdale had ambitions to facilitate further joint working across all partners including education. Capita ONE had been in place for several years at Rochdale but did not have the levels of integration to social care that the Council would have liked. In addition to this, it had a different look and feel to the Liquidlogic case management system which was familiar to users.

There was a desire to rationalise suppliers and cost within the Council which drove discussions with several suppliers of education management systems. Following a thorough procurement process, Rochdale MBC took the decision to contract with Liquidlogic for its Early Years & Education System (EYES).

The Business Case

Speaking about the cashable benefits in implementing Liquidlogic EYES, Scott Moseley, MIS Portfolio Manager says:

"The support and maintenance costs for our legacy system were deemed expensive in comparison to other line of business applications deployed at Rochdale. Our legacy system sat on an Oracle platform which was cost prohibitive in terms of licence costs - this was in comparison to SQL licences. In addition to this, there was a desire to remove all Oracle based applications from the estate.

The legacy system also required a client install for each release. This meant that the Applications Team had to ‘package’ each release and was a further overhead. Other factors included a drive to rationalise systems and suppliers, a reduction in hardware costs by using Liquidlogic EYES and lower support costs for maintaining and developing systems.

Finally, we knew that existing staff were familiar with the Liquidlogic user interface through early help and children’s and adults’ social care systems."

User Experience

In addition to the cashable benefits, the project team at Rochdale analysed the differences in user experience between the two systems and found that the look and feel of the incumbent legacy system was “dated”. Also, it was not browser based, difficult to configure for local requirements and not particularly intuitive to navigate.

Scott Moseley adds:

"Comparatively, EYES has a common look and feel with other Liquidlogic applications already in situ, provides a holistic view of the child and family, supports informed decision making, and offers an opportunity to streamline processes utilising workflow as well as supporting integrated working. Finally, as an early adopter of EYES, it was obvious that we would have an opportunity to shape the development of the product."

Go-Live

A significant element of the project at Rochdale involved Liquidlogic supporting the Council with data migration. The Council’s internal loss of resource in this area at a crucial point within the project was unexpected and threatened the go-live plan.

Speaking about this, Scott Moseley says:

"The loss of a key member of the migration team early in the EYES project could have been a real issue for us and posed a significant threat to go-live. We spoke to Liquidlogic who assured us that they were able to step in and keep our go-live on track. The Data Migration Team at Liquidlogic was organised, focussed and meticulous in their approach. Without them we would have struggled to go-live as planned and they have been an integral part of the success of our EYES project."

Rochdale took EYES live in August 2019 as planned, this included Admissions.

Scott Moseley concludes:

"Liquidlogic has worked well with the team here to make sure that our go-live was to plan and on budget. A second phase recently saw Rochdale take additional EYES modules live including Early Years, Education, Health & Care Plans (EHCP) and Groupwork. This will facilitate even further joined up working with partners throughout the region."

Further Benefits

Data entered once into the system as opposed to multiple times, for example:

• Personal Education Plans (PEP)
• Education, Health and Care Plans (EHCP)
• Ability to report across a joint database as opposed to separate silos of information
• Easier to report against “joined-up data”
• Opportunity to analyse factors which may influence outcomes
• Opportunity to report on a wider data set about children and families.

Next Steps

Rochdale Metropolitan Borough Council integrated Liquidlogic’s Early Years & Education System (EYES) to enhance joint working across education and social care.The implementation included significant data migration support, ensuring a smooth transition and better service coordination for children and families.

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