Services Australia selects EY and Deloitte for GovERP transformation
Ernst & Young and Deloitte have landed separate contracts on the government’s ongoing GovERP project, which seeks to align the SAP systems among a number of large government departments.
Services Australia has tapped the Big Four firms to support the federal government’s SAP-based overhaul and alignment of its enterprise resource planning systems.
Sharing in initial spoils of more than $20 million, EY will help to deliver the unified SAP S/4 HANA platform through to the middle of next year, while Deloitte has been contracted for program management services over the same period.
Underway since 2019, the GovERP project has been described as providing the APS with a common “digital backbone” in standardising ERP systems across the government’s six shared-services hubs, located within the ATO, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the Industry department, Treasury and Finance, and Services Australia – with five of those operating on existing SAP systems with support set to expire in 2025.
Granted in November but only recently published, the $14.5 million contract awarded to EY has seen it named as a GovERP “strategic delivery partner”, the first time the firm has been engaged on the stuttering project, which racked up a $35 million contractor bill over its first two years for apparently little progress and has since changed oversight.
The total expected cost of the project remains undisclosed, with the government citing commercial sensitivities for not disclosing details.
A spokesperson from Services Australia, which last year took over the project from the Finance department due to the latter’s lack of in-house expertise (with Services Australia claimed to have the largest SAP workforce in the Southern Hemisphere), told media outlet InnovationAus that EY would work alongside its staff and “provide specialised skills across design and development, enterprise architecture, and release management.”
Meanwhile, fellow Big Four professional services firm Deloitte has since been awarded a $6 million mandate on the project, and will according to the Services Australia spokesperson provide “specialised programme management functions including programme and project governance, coordination, management and administration, management of benefits, tracking of programme risks and issues and programme scheduling.”
Alongside Accenture and strategy consulting giants McKinsey and BCG, the Big Four have been significant beneficiaries of recent federal government largesse, driven largely by the Covid-19 pandemic and widespread digital transformation agenda. The first year of the pandemic saw Deloitte and EY grow their federal government take by upwards of 33 percent, with the latter then more than doubling its haul again in 2021.
