Parliament’s SAP-based expense management software has delivered only partial benefits, despite seven years and $74 million of investment, and will need until 2026 to deliver many basic functions.
Finance officials on Monday night said a benefits realisation review ordered in the wake of an audit office inquiry has been completed.
The review found the benefits used to justify the Parliamentary Expense Management System (PEMS) in 2018 and its original $38 million have only “partially” been realised.
“… It’s certainly not a glowing… result,” assistant secretary of business enabling services Alex McKellar told Senate Estimates.
Mr McKeller was unable to provide a copy of the completed benefits realisation review on Monday despite Finance agreeing last year to provide it to the Senate when complete.
Senators frustrated with the PEMS system they rely on to manages expenses and payroll services have used estimates to extract more details on the troubled project.
This has included the incorrect assumptions that a market leading SAP solution would require only minimal customisation, how it led to an embarrassing pause on public expense reporting, and that the project was still without basic functionality last year.
On Monday, Mr McKeller said PEMS is currently around eight months into a two-year uplift to deliver missing functions in a more user friendly way. Six of 17 work packages are completed, with the remainder scheduled to be complete by July 2026.
At that point the enhancements to PEMS and the overall project will be assessed again.
The troubled project has highlighted the challenges of outsourcing government technology work and how quickly projects can veer off course without proper planning and governance. It has also sparked debate about whether Australian suppliers are being overlooked.
Local SAP rival TechnologyOne has been critical of the project and says the huge outlays appear difficult to justify, including the $4 million operating costs.
TechnologyOne government relations director David Forman told a Senate inquiry last May that the audit of PEMS raised doubts about whether the department had “lifted their eyes and looked at what the market alternatives were”.
“… We would have provided, and could still provide, an entire financial management system for half of the cost of just keeping that expense management system going…” he said.
“We were never approached and never asked whether we could provide that functionality. I don’t know how they made the choices, quite frankly. It is something that I personally am shocked by.”
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