Wwhs-2


West Wimmera Health
Country
Australia
State
VIC
Industry
Health and Community Services
Employees
445+

Key Benefits for West Wimmera Health

  • Integration between payroll and other HR modules
  • Accurate costings of staff and time allocations
  • Reduce time spent on mundane tasks
  • Free up staff for HR management and development

Background

West Wimmera Health Service delivers clinical, aged care, regional, and primary care and community support services to people in the West and South Wimmera and Southern Mallee regions in western Victoria, Australia.

The service employs 500 people at eight sites. In 2000/01 its acute services treated more than 1,700 patients and its aged care facilities had more than 170 nursing home patients. Programmes at WWHS target chronic and acquired illness, with medical and surgical specialties readily accessible. Disability, home-based and aged care services are also key components.

Challenges and Goals

Early in 2000 West Wimmera Health was told that its Allegiance payroll system was being phased out. After a tendering/contract process via the Grampians Region of Victoria Hospital’s IT Alliance, PayGlobal was chosen to provide a solution.

Personnel Officer at West Wimmera Health, Gordon Schultz, says the service had already heard about the PayGlobal solution through talking with other hospitals in Victoria. He says one of the reasons it liked PayGlobal was the integration it offered between Payroll and all its other HR packages.

“Having watched the development of PayGlobal for around five years at other healthcare providers in Victoria, we were also reassured that it had already been proven in the public hospital field at Hamilton Base Hospital.”

Gordon says the service also appreciated that the PayGlobal components would reduce the time spent on mundane tasks such as time sheet entry, freeing up staff to spend more time on essential and strategic tasks such as HR management and development.

“We also realised that the PayGlobal package would give better accountability of staff time in an environment that has to deal with staff shifts that cover 24 hours per day at several locations.”

Process and Solution

West Wimmera Health began implementing PayGlobal in March 2001. It started with Payroll, which it was using by July 2001. It has since added the Rostering component and Time and Attendance. Gordon Schultz says the implementation went smoothly with existing data able to be easily migrated to the new system. “The PayGlobal consultant was very competent, professional and friendly, and transferring data from our old system went without a hitch.” However Gordon notes that implementing the system was never really an issue. More important was whether the system could deliver what it promised.

“We weren’t really concerned about the implementation and knew PayGlobal would deliver. Our focus was on the outcome – making sure that the resulting system worked. We completed three parallel runs with our old payroll system and the new system to compare notes and the result was virtually identical.” Award interpretation was also an important issue for West Wimmera Health and Gordon says the PayGlobal solution ran very well, right from the start.

“That probably reflects the experience that PayGlobal already has in the health market in Victoria. We are also running weekly as well as fortnightly pays to cope with requirements of different awards. The system handles this with ease.”

Business Results and Return

Gordon Schultz says advantages of the new systems were quickly apparent, including more accurate costings of staff and time allocations through the use of PayGlobal Rostering.

Get in touch

  • Customer Call Centre Australia
  • 1800 129 181
  • Customer Call Centre New Zealand
  • 0508 104 357
Enquiry Form

The Alliance asked providers to supply a request for information (RFI) and received 14 replies. Six providers were asked to supply a request for tender (RFT) and this was cut to a shortlist of two, from which the group finally chose PayGlobal.

Read their story ▸

Steve Bowmaker, CIO

Hume Health, Australia