The Victorian Electoral Commission (VEC) is set to roll out a new Personnel Management System, allowing the commission to centrally manage and provide more consistent staff pay.
Read more on the Victorian Electoral Commission
The system will be based on a centralised database that enables the recording of all information about each staff member — whether executive officer, Victorian Public Service member, or election appointee.
It will also provide tools and modules for managing recruitment; staff and costings, including appointee allocation, time-recording, Occupational Health and Safety (OH&S) and performance management; payroll; learning management; and corporate information.
The system must be able to manage appointees across one or many concurrent elections or election projects, and across one or many financial years and will generate a range of reports.
“The system will need to be accessible by employees and appointees at head office, and at the warehouse as well as by appointees working in remotely-based election sites,” VEC documents on the project read.
“As the cyclic nature of election work means that appointees will be using the system for short periods of time with minimal training, it must be intuitive and easy to use.
“The VEC acknowledges that it may be difficult to find one system that is able to achieve such an outcome. As such, and given that the VEC already has several applications in-place for performing many of the functions, it is willing to consider solutions that do not meet all the high-level requirements, yet can integrate with the VEC’s existing applications to form a centralised solution.”
The VEC employs about 80 ongoing, fixed-term or casual staff to manage state and local elections, state referenda and other elections.
Up to 20,000 people can be appointed as ‘election appointees’ to assist in running elections, with varying rates of pay and employment conditions.
The VEC has a number of systems in place that currently support the management and payment of staff.
Its Election Management System, developed as an in-house application in the late 1990s, now runs a personnel module to help manage election officials and casuals during elections.
A VEC-developed and implemented online application system for election officials and election casuals is also used, as is a third-party developed appointee training system.
A Microsoft Access HR Database linked to the Attaché payroll system is used as a workaround resource information system to manage the HR information of executive officers and VPS employees.
Performance and learning management for VPS employees is managed via a third-party supplied online performance and learning management application. Microsoft SharePoint is used as the central repository for all corporate information, OH&S and policy documents.
The VEC’s finance systems are currently run on Attaché software and include the following modules: Payroll and Personnel to generate the payroll, General Ledger for accounts payable and receivable, and Inventory.
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