R4bn IFMS project moves forward

The State IT Agency (SITA) has published the second tender for its R4 billion integrated financial management system (IFMS), which has attracted the interest of major industry players.

The IFMS is an integration and migration of government finance, human resources, asset management, logistics and other line-of-business solutions, into a single distributed transversal system, across SA's provincial and national government structures.

The tender is for the procurement module of the IFMS, aimed at supporting government's reformed procurement processes, says SITA spokesman Sifiso Ndlazi.

"This will enable government to implement supply chain management, which will integrate with the larger IFMS programme and improve the efficiency of the state's procurement of goods and services," he says.

"The procurement module will also assist in achieving e-government objectives of interoperability, IT security, economies of scale and the elimination of duplicated systems. The module will be acquired as a commercial off-the-shelf application that will be customised to the IDE [integrated development environment], the open enterprise architecture on which all government's transversal systems will run."

According to the tender specifications, the procurement management system will be implemented in 39 national departments and 91 provincial departments, with an estimated user base of at least 17 000 seats, of which 16 000 are procurement practitioners and 1 000 are middle and senior managers.

"Once fully deployed, the system must be capable of processing 100 000 purchase orders per annum, with an estimated total value of R25 billion, together with associated transactional data..."

Ndlazi says it is difficult to place a value on this phase of the IFMS, but says government will spend no more than R4 billion in initial capital on the entire IFMS project, while the lifecycle cost is estimated at R10 billion over 10 years.

While he would not comment which companies have so far shown an interest, it is know that big players, such as Datacentrix, SAS, Business Connexion, SAP, Microsoft, Dimension Data, GijimaAst, IBM and Hewlett-Packard, attended a potential bidders' briefing last month.

The closing date for the procurement module tender is 13 April, says Ndlazi. Meanwhile, the first tender for the IFMS project, issued a month ago, for the integrated development environment toolset, closes today.

Ndlazi points out the IFMS project is on schedule, under the current plan. "We anticipate all the development work on the programme will be completed by 2009 and, thereafter, the focus will be on rolling out the system to the remaining government departments."