Working in partnership with Staffordshire County Council’s Library Service on a bespoke finance integration project, Talis has enabled library invoice data to be transferred from the Talis Library Management System into the Council’s SAP finance system. This has streamlined workflows, improved efficiency and led to substantial cost savings.

The County Council, whose aim is to make Staffordshire an even better place to live, work, visit and invest in, is responsible for all major public services within the county, including libraries. Staffordshire’s 44 static and 11 mobile libraries serve more than 384,000 borrowers, hold a catalogue of more than 1.1 million books, CDs and DVDs and issue 5 million items per year.

This joint finance integration project between Staffordshire’s library service, the finance department and Talis plays an important part in helping the County Council achieve their aims set out in their Strategic Plan; to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their systems and processes, and thus ensuring value for money for all its citizens.

Lynne Stanley, Assistant ICT Manager Children & Lifelong Learning, at Staffordshire County Council commented “Before implementing this integration, our staff had to manually input library invoice data into our SAP finance system. Through working with Talis, the automatic transfer of invoice data has resulted in considerable costs savings and improved accuracy.”

Ceri McCall, Senior Manager, Sales and Marketing commented “We are experiencing growing demand from libraries, driven by the need to integrate their services for greater efficiencies. We are delighted that this initiative is generating immediate efficiencies and cost saving benefits for Staffordshire.”

Talis is working with various libraries to seamlessly integrate library services with Council wide systems such as corporate Web sites, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and finance systems. We are currently working with libraries to seamlessly integrate library services with SAP, Agresso and other bespoke finance systems, through our broader integration solution Talis Keystone.  If you are interested and keen to achieve similar efficiencies, more information is available online www.talis.com/keystone. Alternatively contact sales@talis.com or 0870 400 5090 to discuss your integration requirements.

Leeds Library and Information Service comprises 54 libraries, five mobile libraries, a schools library service, four prison libraries and an 'at home' service. The library service attracted over 4.2 million visitors last year, holds a catalogue of 995,000 items and issues over 3 million items per year.

Talis Keystone will enable the Library to expose features from their Talis Library Management System (LMS) and directly embed them into their bespoke Local Authority Finance system.

Patricia Carroll, Libraries Development Manager commented, “We are initially buying Talis Keystone to link our electronic invoices into the Council finance system as the final EDI process. We believe that this will deliver a Gershon saving of circa £10,000 per year. We envisage Talis Keystone raising the profile of libraries within the Council, by integrating with all systems relating to citizen authentication, e-payments and we consider it as part of our embryonic portal developments.''

Ceri McCall, Senior Manager for Sales and Marketing commented, “We are very pleased to welcome Leeds Library and Information Service to our growing community of Talis Keystone customers. We are

experiencing growing demand from libraries, driven by the need to integrate their services for greater efficiencies. Feedback to date from libraries and their developers has been extremely positive, particularly in

relation to the speed, flexibility and ease of implementation.”

Leeds Library and Information Service joins the University of Greenwich, Queen’s University Belfast and University College Dublin, who have already successfully implemented Talis Keystone to integrate their library services into their portals and Virtual Learning Environments (VLE’s).

The Talis Keystone architecture leverages industry standards such as XML and SOAP to enable interoperability between library and institutional systems. Talis’ approach is to empower both institutions and the developer community to deploy Talis Keystone themselves, by providing the necessary tools and support via a special ‘sandbox’ available within the Talis Developer Network (www.talis.com/tdn/keystone).

For more information about Talis Keystone please visit www.talis.com/keystone or contact 0870 400 5090.