Services Australia discloses "delays" on GovERP project

Services Australia has blamed unspecified “delays” for $60 million of planned work on a SAP-based common ERP system for government being pushed back by a year.

GovERP is designed to consolidate corporate and financial systems across the government’s six shared services hubs, replacing existing SAP-based ERP systems that will reach end-of-life by 2025 with a single, modern S/4 HANA platform.

Services Australia received two years of funding in the 2021 federal budget for GovERP though the amount was withheld at the time, citing “commercial sensitivities”.

Appearing at senate estimates on Wednesday, Services Australia’s chief financial officer Angela Diamond said that $60 million of work on GovERP that had meant to be performed this financial year had been shifted into 2023-24 instead.

“We’ve moved $60 million from this financial year into next financial year,” Diamond said.

“That was for the GovERP project … due to some delays. Obviously there’s a lot of activity in trying to undertake this work.”

Diamond said the funds had been “reprofiled” - meaning the timing of the spend had been pushed out, but that the project would not lose the funding.

She suggested that chief information and digital officer Charles McHardie would know more specifics about why the GovERP work had been pushed out.

However, Western Australian senator Linda Reynolds, whose questions about budget allocations led to the disclosure of the “reprofiling” of GovERP funds, suggested that Services Australia could provide any additional information on the cause of the delays at a later date.

Services Australia’s most recent corporate plan [pdf] had shown no signs of any change to the cadence of planned work on the GovERP project, compared to the previous iteration of the plan. [pdf]