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Time & Attendance Solutions
Everyone has apparently heard about the payroll disaster in Queensland Health – where the old Lattice system was to be replaced by a centralised SAP installation and a rostering system called Workbrain. IBM had the job of implementing the systems by August 2008 at a cost of around $6.5m. Well it didn’t happen until March 2010 and the cost is now around $65m and it doesn’t work. The Queensland Auditor General has found the health department and ICT management deficient and IBM to blame for the debacle. The government is re-thinking the arrangement and has decided to implement smaller local payroll systems, probably retaining SAP as the base system. By the time this is sorted out by the end of the year the cost will be closer to $200m (according to the Courier Mail) but then again its only taxpayers money so no-one will lose their job for incompetence. Besides no-one loses their job over decisions to use IBM and SAP do they? Not in the public sector anyway. Even in the private sector where SAP installations have failed leading to companies going belly-up those involved are able to walk away with a neat payout – in these cases it's the shareholder who do their dough.
So what can be learnt from the Queensland events apart from the fact that there is no accountability from government, IBM, SAP, Workbrain, departmental officers? I’d suggest that there are again lessons to be learnt about change management, competent implementers, proven software that can be scaled to suit the client, simplicity, and robust project management.
It is hard to imagine any implementation that knowingly goes live with problems – did they think the fairies would sort out the problems? To turn the system on without running parallel for a while is foolhardy but understandable given that the rostering (ie the front end of the payroll) was being implemented concurrently with payroll. Again, didn’t they wonder what would happen if the rostering interface didn’t pass correct data to payroll. We at Gryphon have just once gone live without a true parallel run but at the same time we were fully aware of the implications and were able to simulate the environment prior to go-live because we wrote the front end.
There’s no need to be put off by this horror story though - If you are still using paper timesheets you might be interested to know that there are cost effective options. Is Kronos too expensive? RosterOn support no good? eTivity not flexible enough? Besides your managers won’t change the way they do things and staff don’t stick to their rosters anyway.
What can you do about payroll costs, the difficulty in recruiting payroll officers, reliability, accuracy, reducing error rates? Think about putting a time and attendance system on your front end. A cost effective one that removes 90% of your award interpretation and keying time in payroll.
For example, Cabrini Health have 6 hospitals with about 24 time clocks of two types connected to the GryTNA software which provides the award interpretation for about 3000 employees on a daily basis.
World Vision originally used the GryTNA for their Australia wide casual workforce but more recently placed all their call centre staff on the same system. A payroll file is produced each fortnight avoiding any interpretation and keying.
So if you are looking to reduce your payroll costs while improving accuracy have a look at the GryTNA system by contacting Col Barling.
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