The federal Department of Finance has put out the call for one or more system integrators to assist with the development of the government’s new SAP-based common ERP system, GovERP.
Less than six months after bringing in more than a dozen SAP specialists, the department on Thursday issued an expression of interest to partners offering build and implementation services.
The GovERP system is being developed to standardise corporate and financial systems across the government’s six shared services hubs, which need to replace their SAP-based ERP systems by 2025.
Finance has already settled on SAP’s S/4 HANA platform to underpin GovERP, and in March went looking for a new enterprise cloud platform to host SAP.
According to documents, the integrators will be responsible for designing, building and testing GovERP for SAP S/4 HANA and deploying the system to an initial set of 15 agencies.
Integrators will also be tasked with providing end-to-end process integration such as with travel and expense management systems, as well as the migration of data from SAP ECC6 or other core ERP systems.
Finance is currently in the process of develop a reusable template for GovERP that it expects will be “documented and configured” by the end of the 2020-21 financial year ready for the first instance.
It was funded with $35.6 million in this year’s budget to progress the framework for GovERP – $12.3 million of which had already been spent as at October.
The framework – which will provide a “layered architecture” for the SAP system – will then be augmented by the integrator prior to the on-boarding of the first agencies from September 2022.
The integrator will be expected to make design, build and test improvements, in keeping with the whole-of-government standards and process outlined by Finance as the GovERP template “design authority”.
“Finance expects the first instance to ‘go live' in September 2022 (including an anchor consumer) followed by progressive cutovers for the remaining agreed consumers,” documents state.
“By [the] end of Q3 FY22/23 it is planned there will be approximately 15 agencies consumers and 12,000 end users on the first instance.”
System integrators will also be required to “uplift the capability of consumers” before they shift to GovERP, which is expected to include “readiness work”, change management and business process re-engineering.
While Finance received funding to develop the GovERP framework, tender documents stress that the delivery of any integration services are “currently not funded”.
The department has, however, already prepared a first pass business case outlining the options available to deliver the first GovERP instance and on-board agencies already consuming shared ERP.
It has also recently engaged a business case advisor to develop a second pass business case that will outline the benefits and risks around the first GovERP instances and the on-boarding of agencies.
Submission to the expression of interest process will close on January 25, with a request for tender currently slated for March 2021.
