Enterprise-wide time recording system for more than 2,000 people delivers on benefits sought
Debbie Ward
Director of Planning and Business Transformation

The Situation

The Ministry for Primary Industries’ (MPI) purpose is to grow and protect New Zealand.

MPI works to achieve four outcomes: maximise export opportunities; improve sector productivity; increase sustainable resource use; and protect from biological risk.

MPI are the gateway to New Zealand’s government for the primary sector with activities spanning the full value chain of primary production – from the paddock, ocean or forest, through to the processing and transportation chain, all the way to the market and ultimately the consumer.

The Challenge

MPI set out on this project with the challenge of creating a consistent way of recording, reporting, and in some areas recovering costs, for the time and services, of the approximately 2,400 people who work for MPI.

A detailed assessment identified there were several legacy time-recording systems that were used by around 1,100 people, as well as a variety of spreadsheets used by a further 500. MPI saw this as an opportunity to improve organisational performance and cost effectiveness through the use of an enterprise-wide time recording system.

The Solution

A full Request for Proposal process was conducted at the end of 2012/early 2013 to identify a solution. The solution requirements included functional requirements for time recording entry, non-time entry, workflow integration, reporting, usability, administration, accessibility, and billing cost recovery. Olympic Software’s Go workforce productivity software was selected as the solution that was most suited to MPI’s requirements and in May 2013 the project commenced.

The first phase of the project involved further analysis through extensive engagement with MPI staff, to produce a Solution Planning Study. The benefits of this approach is that as well as refining the business requirements, it  built  a high degree of confidence in  the solution requirements across the organisation and identified further business process improvement opportunities.

The next two phases of implementing the Go application involved delivering the core timesheet solution to MPI staff nationwide followed by client invoicing functionality. The project is ongoing and to date, Olympic has implemented core functionality and time recording capability to half of the MPI staff. Client invoicing functionality is currently in pilot phase with go-live due early 2016. Some of the benefits that MPI were seeking at the beginning of this project were to be able to get information about where time was being spent, for reporting, and for recovery. The recent fruit fly response involved a large number of people from across the organisation and from across the country and MPI were able to capture time spent on this project and by whom.

MPI have also integrated Go timesheet solution with their Business Intelligence tool for reporting. They feed data into the BI tool and then combine it with information from HR. This has increased visibility on where time is being spent in the organisation.

We valued working with the team from Olympic. They were keen to work with us and understand MPI’s business so they could identify the best approach for configuring Go to meet our needs.

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