WA Health embarks on massive payroll system overhaul

Western Australia's health department has started searching for an integrated HR, payroll and rostering solution to serve its 50,000-strong workforce after receiving $8.5 million to kick off the procurement.

WA Health’s shared services unit, the Health Support Service (HSS), approached the market for the new HRMIS on Wednesday, actioning a key recommendation in the government’s sustainable health review.

The review, released last year, called for widespread IT reform across the WA health system, including replacing the WA Health’s ageing HR, payroll and rostering system with a single workforce information system.

The government has committed $8.5 million in the upcoming budget to finding a HRMIS, and plans to use a proof-of-concept process - capped at $250,000 - to find a solution that meets the needs of the department.

Further funding for implementation and delivery is expected in the 2021-22 budget, with the final solution expected to be used to improve workforce reporting, governance and planning and give staff the ability to access information about shifts, leave and pay online.

The five-year transformation will see WA Health replace four “duplicate and independent software applications” used for HR, payroll and rostering, which are “outdated, not integrated and rely on manual processing to serve the workforce”.

Tender documents reveal the department currently uses Lattice and Ascender Pay for payroll, ShiftMatch for casual nursing pool management, and a rostering application called RoStar, which interfaces with the HR and payroll systems.

Lattice, which has been in place since 1994, is used to pay the wages of 80 percent of WA Health’s workforce, with the remaining 20 percent served by Ascender Pay since it was introduced in 2008.

Whereas the existing systems require employees to “fill out a form and email it to HSS", the new software-as-a-service system is expected to allow employees to access and update personal information through a HR portal.

WA Health plans to use the market process to identify an “appropriate contract model and service delivery model”, before entering a contract of up to 20 years with a prime contractor for the HRMIS, including implementation, integration and support.

“This HRMIS cloud-based solution should not require customisation beyond the state legislative requirements that must already be met by the standard solution,” tender documents state.

The full solution, which needs to be hosted within Australia and not “in a multi-tenanted (shared) environment” will cover “HR employee records, payroll, rostering and attendance capture, and award interpretation (engine) functions”.

Submission to the tender close on November 13, with a virtual briefing to be held on October 8. Vendors will be shortlisted to engage in the proof-of-concept process before the end of the year.