back to article HP loses MoD payroll and pensions deal to CSC

HP has lost the contract to supply pay, HR and pensions administration to the Service Personnel and Veterans Agency (SPVA) for the UK armed forces. "HP will work to ensure a seamless transition of activities to the successful bidder, ensuring no loss of service to the thousands of people who depend on the service," HP said in …

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  1. Spearchucker Jones
    Go

    Lol :-) Good luck to CSC. That HR system has given so much trouble that even just *looking* at the thing runs the risk of making it fall over in fits of blue screens and circuit melt-downs.

    1. Inachu
      Thumb Down

      CSC Bleehhhh.

      CDC is the most self righteous IT firm in the world. Think of any complaint in the IT world and CSC is rife with self preservation VS what is good for the company mantra.

      No matter how CSC gets in teh news I make sure not to ever deal with them on any level.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    CSC

    Correct me if I'm wrong but is CSC kicking butt in the Service biz lately?

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Real money saving in action

    So the contract is worth £57m a year, plus SPVA's own admin costs of around £40m (from SPVA's annual report).

    SPVA pays pensions and service salaries. In the real world, that costs about £40 per payee per year, including payroll runs, payslips, expenses and bonus processing, banking transfers and audit. That's for a competent in house service centre, using some but none-too-advanced on-line tools and UK based permanent employees - I work for a company beating the £40 benchmark, serving around 12,000 employees, with around 30 different sets of T&Cs, multiple collective agreements etc.

    With circa 850,000 payees served by SPVA, allowing them £40 per head means it should be costing them around £34m a year with no further scale efficiencies over my lot's 12,000. So the civil service bunglers are being paid more than enough to do the job in the first place, but then have additionally paid an outsourcer the same again plus a 50% margin (before the variation invoices start flying). But EDS set the bar high - in 2006/7 they reamed SPVA out for £91m.

  4. Cucumber C Face
    Mushroom

    Let's hope they do btter than the NHS

    CSC have taken billions from the NHS in both real money and opportunity cost ...

    http://www.ehi.co.uk/news/EHI/7666/csc-and-dh-talks-will-drag-on-to-june

    Like Accenture they were seduced by iSoft in the procurement stages... that worked out really well

    http://www.ehi.co.uk/news/EHI/7688/isoft-trial-told-of-%27forgery-kit%27

    Only CSC were so impressed they subsequently bought the company....

    http://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240105223/CSC-closes-acquisition-of-iSoft-ahead-of-NHS-IT-contract-renegotiations

    There is however b*****r all to choose between the big management consultancies.

    Basically IMO - if the answer is BT/Accenture/CSC/HP/Capita/etc - you're asking the wrong question. Unless the question is "how do I advance my personal PHB career from a undeserved six figure salary in the upper tier of the Public Sector into seven+."

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    Knight's Cross of Meh, 1st Class.

    Stories like this will be news when and only when the new supplier is not one of the same old bunch of megacorporate megaincompetent public sector trough-snorters.

  6. blofse
    FAIL

    pensions deal to CSC

    Oh good, looks like no one will get paid then!

    CSC are frigging useless from my experience. They make 100's of obvious mistakes and then charge you, the company (who is paying for their service) for that. I swear that was their business model - keep within SLA's but go over the SLA 90% of the time because it means more profit.

    Good luck to them, guess they don't want to pay civil servants in normal ways anymore.... time to find a new social club ;-)

  7. N2

    Dear faceless committe at MOD

    No doubt your waistlines are expanding significantly following all the corporate lunches paid from your 'preferred suppliers' wallet.

    Xafinity Paymaster did a good job for several years, why do you want to re-invent a perfectly circular thing all over again?

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    How difficult can an HR system be?

    And how can it possibly cost hundreds of millions? Half a dozen mainframe or as/400 bods could write it in a year, and give it to you for free, and the maintenance would cost no more than their salaries.

    Something has gone wrong with I/T.

    1. I herd cats.

      Re: How difficult can an HR system be?

      Payroll & Pensions != HR.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: How difficult can an HR system be?

      I think the common misconception here is that it is "Just Pay & Pensions" that is a big part of it, but there are lots of other components of IT that SPVA are responsible for, and subsequently so are any IT Supplier. The things that spring to mind:

      - Armed Forces Compensation Scheme (AFCS) Computer System

      - War Pensions Computer System (Predecesor to AFCS)

      - Training Systems

      - Prisoner Records (e.g. Court Marshalls)

      - Helpdesk (and the IT that goes along with that)

      - Desktop UAD provisioning

      I think in total there are in the order of 100 Applications expected to be supported by the IT Provider.

      Not to mention that part that actually should be simple - i.e. the Payroll element, is so hideously complex because of MOD rules, allowances and supplements that the JPA system has had to be so hacked together it becomes extermely complext to maintain.

      THAT is where the cost goes - strip MOD process / complexity out of the equation, and you can get back to a reasonable benchmark.

  9. Polyphonic
    Thumb Down

    Nooooo

    Paymaster do a good job, they have never screwed up my pension.

    Crapita and CSC on the other hand cannot handle anything correctly. I guess they will be "leveraging" their vast employee pool of overseas drones.

    Still HP have a habit of losing business that EDS had held for years.

  10. All names Taken

    All are winners?

    IF HP loses UK staff that were TUPEd into HP I reckon that is a good thing.

    Of course, every job lost is a bad thing but TUPE could only be conceived in the mind of UK civil servants for UK civil servants.

    Good luck to the new winners

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