The State Transit Authority has been removed from the scope of Transport for NSW’s SAP ERP implementation program, and other agencies have had their go-lives deferred, according to the latest report by the Audit Office of New South Wales.
The program was initiated back in 2013 to replace multiple legacy financial, human resource, payroll and procurement systems across all Transport agencies with one SAP solution.
Transport for NSW went live on the new system in July 2015, and Roads and Maritime Services in July 2016.
As the costs mounted for the program, however, with $172 million of the $196 million budget already used by 30 June 2016 with several major delivery components still to be completed, the department sought to contain cost and risk around the program, removing the State Transit Authority (STA) from the scope in January 2016.
Since then, a new ERP business case has instead been approved for an enhancement of STA’s existing Ellipse system, planned for July 2018.
Sydney Trains, which had originally been scheduled for go-live in January 2017 alongside NSW Trains, has been deferred to June 2017 “to mitigate business risks”. The Contract and Catalogue Management functionality, to be rolled out to all agencies, will also be deferred until 2017.
The Audit Office’s report said with such alterations to the time, scope and cost of the program budget, the program was at risk of failing to deliver a quality system.
In particular, it highlighted the number of change requests which had been approved between the program’s inception in January 2013 and October 2016 – 111 change requests totalling $82 million.
Though it was noted that the program management are not accepting any further changes to the system, “limiting the project scope when legitimate changes are needed could impair quality and result in a system that does not fully meet agencies’ needs”, the report stated.
