NSW Education's final LMBR cog faces new delays

The final component of the NSW Department of Education’s heavily protracted LMBR overhaul is facing a fresh bout of delays because of issues surrounding the new payroll and HR system.

The massive department has been forced to push back the final release of the SAP-based system – which covers the majority of the state’s public school staff – to mid-November 2018, six months later than expected.

Education has been progressing a staged deployment of the system through a series of targeted releases since February this year.

The system is the last component of the department's mammoth program to replace the state’s group of 15-year-old finance, human resources, payroll and student administration systems over the last 12 years.

Other components of the program include the SAP-based finance system and Tribal ebs4-based student administration and learning management (SALM) system, which the state's last schools moved to last October following multiple setbacks.

The department planned to deploy the HR and payroll system to corporate staff and staff from 32 schools in the far South Coast Principals Network in March this year, before moving to the other 110,000 permanent, temporary and casual employees across rural, regional and metropolitan schools.

It had hoped to see the last releases of its new SAP-based payroll and HR systems come online before last July.

But the implementation timeframe has since stretched, with only around 28,000 staff across 478 schools in both non-metro and metro Principal Networks gaining access to the system since the first release was delivered in March.

The Public Service Association (PSA) claims that the implementation has come up against “numerous issues” such as staff being incorrectly paid since the department deployed release three.

The department has now pushed back the final release of the payroll and HR systems – which covers all remaining staff – to November after a PSA meeting with the Education minister Rob Stokes and deputy secretary Peter Riordan earlier this month.

It is also planning for face-to-face training for administrative staff to be conducted at the start of the fourth terms during October.

“This training will address processes that have been identified by EDConnect as issues experienced by schools having implemented HR Payroll,” a PSA bulletin states.