NI Department of Health awards Axon £20m contract to implement shared services

HR and finance functions will be provided from a new central organisation

The Department of Health, Social Services and Public Safety in Northern Ireland (DHSP) has awarded Axon Solutions a £20m contract to create efficiencies and streamline processes in its human resource functions through the introduction of a shared services system.

DHSP is currently made up of ten separate organisations, which employ approximately 70,000 staff, where each has its own disparate organisational structures.

An online tender highlights that DHSP had come to the conclusion that there are "financial and operational benefits to be gained from the introduction of a shared services organisation providing business and common services".

This shared services organisation will provide human resource, payroll, travel, finance, procurement and logistics transaction processing services to all 10 bodies under the DHSP umbrella.

Axon will be tasked with replacing all current human resource systems.

DHSP currently has to pay 1.1 million invoices, produce 1.5 million payslips, monitor 75,600 job applications and process 200,000 travel claims per annum.

The tender outlines that the new shared services system will allow DHSP to do the following:

• increase efficiency and reduce the cost of business functions
• minimise operational risk and the risk of system failure
• improve resource management, and
• standardise and simplify processes through the introduction of integrated technology solutions that do not require manual intervention.