Starting from scratch in several divisions, the support services company will buy a complete suite of solutions from Oracle, introducing front and back-office systems.

The rollout will take five years to complete, reflecting the size of the task.

Speaking to Finance Week at last week’s (May 18) Annual General Meeting (AGM), Rentokil chief financial officer Andrew Macfarlane says that large swathes of the company’s operations are in serious need of investment.

“Some parts of the business are being computerised for the first time,” he says.

“We are buying new finance systems from Oracle but the investment is not just about improving our back-office operations, we want to improve efficiency across the business from front to back.

“That is why we are buying the whole suite, including Customer Relationship Management, and Enterprise Resource Planning systems.”

The rollout will proceed business by business, with Rentokil’s UK washrooms division first to make the transition.

Implementation in the washrooms business will be completed in October, with a team from the next division to convert observing the process to ensure a smooth transition. The approach will be repeated across the group.

Rentokil points out that the simplicity of the current systems in many businesses negates the possibility of a potentially difficult transition between systems.

“Because many of the divisions are still paper-based there will be no ‘D-Day’, where the business switches over and things can go wrong,” says a Rentokil spokesman.

“If there are any problems, staff can continue on paper until they are fixed.”

The company has said that it does not currently know if the implementation will cause redundancies.