No Fuss SAP Upgrade At The Australian Taxation Office

The Tax Office has a continuing investment in its technology and systems in order to improve its efficiency and its responsiveness to taxpayers. Upgrading its core internal administrative systems is part of this picture and in addition, provides greater flexibility for future improvements. So, the Tax Office commissioned CSC to partner with the Tax Office to upgrade the SAP HR and Finance systems to the latest version of SAP ECC6.

The Challenge

The Tax Office endeavours to help taxpayers and their agents understand their rights and obligations and to make it easy for people to comply with the tax law. By following an empathetic, user-based approach, the Tax Office aims to ensure that administrative solutions are designed and built around what works for taxpayers whilst building community trust in its administration and reducing compliance costs.

With this in mind, it is clear that the Tax Office’s 22,000 employees are critical to its success and require internal systems which work smoothly and reliably, especially the core human resource and financial systems.

The Solution

CSC worked in close collaboration with the ATO to undertake a multi-faceted assessment (qualitative / quantitative review of processes, people and tools) of the current SAP environment. This resulted in a baseline performance analysis and a low-risk upgrade roadmap, using accelerator assessments and methodologies.

The joint team was able to draw on CSC’s invaluable knowledge of the software, the eCC6 version particularly and government specific requirements, as well as its extensive experience managing SAP upgrades and implementations.

The team mapped the Accelerated SAP (ASAP) methodology to the Tax Office’s own guidelines for systems deployment to ensure it covered all aspects of their testing phases.

They developed a comprehensive risk register, checking and rechecking to be certain nothing was omitted – a discipline that paid off as up to 80% of the identified risks were in fact realised – and mitigated as planned.

The Results

From a business perspective, the new SAP platform meant:

• Reduced support costs
• Improved management processes
• Reliable, robust continuity of business
• Enhanced views of business data

From a manager’s and employee’s point of view, the self serve portal:

• Encouraged them to make more use of information available such as trends in the workforce like leave and absences to manage the business better
  
• Made it easier to process transactions in relation to their employment

By retiring the old legacy systems such as the Crystal reports, and consolidating around the central SAP platform, the business now has:

• Easier to use common systems with the same look and feel
• More cost effective support and less training required.