The New South Wales Auditor-General has issued a warning on the potential impact of changes to the rollout of an SAP-based ERP system for the state government’s transport agencies.
The program involves rolling out a single SAP solution to replace multiple legacy finance, HR, payroll, procurement and HR systems across agencies in the Transport for NSW cluster. The program had an initial 2015 completion date; it has been pushed back to 2017.
Transport for NSW and Roads and Maritime Services are currently using the new system, with delivery for NSW Trains scheduled to be completed in January. Implementation of the new ERP system at Sydney Trains has been pushed back to June next year due to the difficulty of migrating off its existing Ellipse platform.
A report released today by Auditor-General Margaret Crawford noted that the State Transport Authority (STA) in January was removed from the program, with the agency instead working on enhancing its current Ellipse system.
In addition, the report noted, implementation of Contract and Catalogue Management functionality has been deferred to June for all agencies.
“The deferral means some agencies will not realise the full benefits and efficiencies from the new procurement function and integrated SAP ERP system until June 2017,” the report states.
The report also reveals that management of the program have stop accepting further changes to the rollout, with the 111 changes approved since the rollout begun in January 2013 costing $82 million.
“Limiting the project scope by excluding STA, deferring the roll out of functionality and restricting legitimate change requests could impair quality and result in a system that does not fully meet agencies’ needs,” Crawford said in a statement.
“Transport agencies should review project budgets and delivery schedules to address any impact of deferred implementation.”
The SAP rollout has a budget of $196 million, including a $45 million contingency. Most of the contingency was fully allocated in 2015, with the balance used in 2016, states the report. At the end of FY16, 88 per cent of the budget had been used, leaving $24 million for the remaining ERP implementations.
In addition to the funding for the whole-of-cluster rollout, Transport for NSW, Sydney Trains and NSW Trains, and RMS have been allocated a total of $122 million for agency integration, localisation and deployment.