Australia’s Department of Health has called upon platform developers to help implement a new integrated data and analytics human resources (HR) system, which will tap into data repositories from across the DoH and external agency systems.

The new commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) platform is expected provide an “accurate, secure, flexible and timely view of the workforce, including comprehensive metrics, measures, dimensions, reports and analytic capabilities”, tender documents state.

Integrated features within the new COTS platform, such as “out-of-the-box reports [and] dashboards”, will support DoH executives’ and management’s policymaking and resourcing obligations, it said.

The DoH expects delivery of the new system within a 12-month timeframe from September 2020.

“Understanding the department’s workforce, the roles people undertake and the capabilities, (or knowledge, skills and behaviours) they have now and those they will need in the future is pivotal in positioning the Department to best deliver its objectives and manage workforce-related risks,” the DoH said in its request for tender.

The new platform would effectively overhaul the Department’s overwhelmingly “manual” HR reporting and workforce analysis processes.

“Significant time and effort is spent on manually generating reports,” the DoH said.

“Data requests are also growing in complexity and scope, expanding from transactional reporting to include a strategic focus answering broader and more diverse questions. The current manual approach creates a growing burden.”

HR reporting and analytics teams at the DoH are required to produce HR-related reports sourced from multiple data housing systems. “Data extracted from primary data sources (i.e. SAP R/3 and SAP Business Objects Business Intelligence), is cleansed using complex business rules and integrated with data from other systems to formulate the required reports.”

The all-in-one solution will be required to automatically ingest, collate and analyse data from a number of discrete systems in use by the Department, including SAP HR, used across a number of Federal agencies, the Acendre built e-Recruit system, a proprietary recruitment platform, SolvInjury, a workplace injury case management system, and the massive Comcare database, which houses injury management and claims data from across all Commonwealth agencies, among others.

The new system is also expected to be adaptable to integrate additional datasets, including employee survey data.

Submissions close on 20 August 2020.