Accenture has been awarded a $163.7 million contract from the NSW Department of Communities and Justice to provide a unified enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution for four initial state government clusters.
Last month, the department unveiled the contract for the first phase of the government ERP system consolidation known as the Process and Technology Harmonisation (PaTH) initiative.
It comes more than two years after the Secretaries Board approved the consolidation of ERP systems at five clusters and the Department of Customer Services began preliminary scoping work.
However, as we noted, the Communities and Justice department recently seized responsibility for the initiative, and Customer Services is no longer scheduled to participate in the initial phase.
The project has been financed to the tune of $187.3 million over four years from 2020-21, as reported in the mid-year budget update in January 2021, with funds coming from the Digital Restart Fund.
Following a multi-stage contract process, a community and justice representative informed that Accenture was chosen to “help with the development and deployment of the one ERP system.”
According to the NSW government’s tendering website, the seven-year contract was the outcome of a restricted tender.
The spokeswoman, who described the procurement process as “competitive,” refused to reveal how many vendors were approached for the offer or how many submitted bids. The Accenture contract is for ‘horizon one,’ the first of three horizons that would combine shared services operations and ERP systems throughout government.
Horizon one will provide an ERP platform and operational model for up to 40 agencies in the Stronger Communities, Planning, Regional NSW, and Premier and Cabinet clusters. Potential business cases are likely to identify future horizons, implying that the Customer Service cluster may still be included in the consolidation attempt in the future.
Last year, Customer Service completed the transformation of its shared services, replacing its Unisys-led GovConnect initiative with a new ‘best of breed’ IT service model.
Accenture has recently received much lucrative government IT contracts, notably at the federal level.
The company received a $60 million contract to digitize arriving passenger cards and gather information on overseas travelers’ immunization status in September. It also recently received $53 million in contracts to improve and maintain support for the My Health Record system and a $31 million deal for single business registration consolidation.
