South Australia's Department of Health has gone to market for the supply and implementation of an enterprise resource planning and asset management system to be deployed statewide across health institutions.
(Credit: ZDNet.com.au)
The sought systems would include financial management, supply chain and warehousing, asset management, budgeting and business intelligence functions, although no funds had been set aside for asset management as yet, with the information received in a response set to make a business case for government money.
SA Health manages $3.6 billion worth of assets, according to tender documents.
Currently the state's various health services and hospitals use different systems for their finances, supply chain management and asset management, including in-house systems, Masterpiece, Homer, Harmony, Qantel, IBA, SAMIS, spreadsheets, HIMS and others.
The statewide implementation of these new systems would ideally make no allowance for local versions, according to the tender documents, with the aim of realising economies of scale in support personnel, infrastructure and licensing costs. The project aims to provide users with better access to information as well as carrying out transactions more consistently and streamlining processes.
The project would also allow South Australia to gain a tidy one-upmanship on other states. "It is important to emphasis that a statewide operating model will place the SA Health sector substantially ahead of its counterparts in terms of process and data standardisation," the tender documents said.
The SA tender documents touched on the South Australian Government's broader shared service initiative, saying that although the government's direction on financial and supply chain systems had not been set, the ease of integration with any future shared services plans was to be considered. It could even benefit the supplier.
"Respondents to this invitation are to note and take into consideration in their response that the preferred solution may become the preferred solution across-government and/or utilised by other government agencies in South Australia," the tender documents said.
Another SA Health goal which the system would have to work with was procurement reform to reduce the $1 billion it intended to spend over the next year on supplies and services. At the moment over 60 per cent of products supplied are outside the hospital's inventory management and reordering systems. A national product catalogue developed by the National E-Health Transition Authority has been identified to help with this problem.
The target date for operational use of the systems is 1 July 2010. SA Health employs around 27,800 staff including the four health regions, the ambulance service and its own head office.
The vendor hasn't been selected yet and the go-live date has been set at 1 July 2010... doesn't sound like the PM has much experience with ERP projects.
Whatever happened to
(1) Determine requirements
(2) Develop project length based on # resources and requriements
(3) Manage project to plan?