Background
The Queensland State Government spends over AU $1Bn annually to deliver vital social services to citizens across all regions of the state. Services are delivered by four state government departments in partnership with more than 600 service providers, which are covered by more than 2,200 active contracts.
The Department of Children, Youth Justice and Multicultural Affairs (The Department), acting on behalf of the Queensland State Government in Australia embarked on a “Social Investment Program” with the objective of improving the quality of child protection, juvenile justice, and other vital community services it delivers to citizens in need.
This program aims to ensure that public money is invested in the right places, for the right people, and in the right way, ultimately improving social outcomes for vulnerable Queenslanders. This would be accomplished through the following objectives:
- Improved probity in the administration of funding to the non-government sector
- Targeted investment, based on community need
- Shared intelligence across Departments and Service Providers to identify improvement areas
- Enhanced collaboration between the Department and service-providing organizations
- Efficacy and efficiency improvements across the social/human services procurement process
As part of this Program, the Department partnered with Infosys EdgeVerve to configure and implement a new social services platform – Procure to Invest (P2i), which now manages the end-to-end procurement of social services, including contracting, payments, and the acquittal of funding by service providers delivering social services across the state. The Department and EdgeVerve created a blueprint across the contracting, payments, and service delivery processes leveraged by several other departments of the Queensland Government that were providing social/human services to citizens in need.
“I have worked with Infosys’ EdgeVerve and JAGGAER on the Procure to Invest implementation as part of the Social Investment Program. The program has been highly complex in scale, scope, and stakeholder breadth, and I have found their team to be at all times professional, having strong platform knowledge and expertise and always demonstrating a passion for problem-solving.
We look forward to seeing the intended benefits come to fruition, including freeing funded organizations and department staff to focus on higher value activities, streamlining the experience for funded organizations, and improving auditability, approval processes, and separation of duties”
Rebecca Peet, Program Director
The Department partners with over 600 non-government organizations (NGOs) to provide social and human services supporting child safety, youth justice, and assisting individuals and community groups with varied cultural backgrounds.
To ensure the highest quality of service delivery, the Department pursues a thorough sourcing process to select the appropriate service provider for each service type and location, then engages in contractual arrangements with the chosen service provider. These contracts are typified by the following characteristics:
- Contract terms are generally 3 – 5 years to provide NGOs with funding certainty.
- Payments are made quarterly and in advance
- NGOs acquit performance metrics quarterly and report on use of funding annually.
Furthermore, as part of the Social Investment Program, the Department was transitioning from a historical approach of providing grants for service delivery to a model of investing – commissioning based on social outcomes. However, the ability to offer higher-quality social services and achieve outcomes was hindered by:
- Inconsistent business processes across service types, departments, and regions.
- Poor visibility into the performance of social services investments due to inconsistent business processes and myriad bespoke, non-integrated, standalone systems.
- Significant compliance concerns as manual processes—both system-based and off-system— frequently resulted in payment errors.
- Existing systems were developed without an architectural plan, compromising data quality and necessitating considerable efforts from the Department staff to ensure accurate reporting.
- Low service provider productivity as service providers were spending a significant amount of time on paperwork related to payments, which could have been spent on providing services to citizens.
The Infosys EdgeVerve Solution
To address challenges in the social services procurement process and support the transition from traditional output-based funding to outcomes-based commissioning, the Queensland Government’s Department of Children, Youth Justice, and Multicultural Affairs implemented the Procure to invest (P2i) platform. The P2i platform powered by TradeEdge Social Services Procurement (SSP) – a SaaS platform that leverages the capabilities of TradeEdge (Contract Performance Management and Payments) and JAGGAER One (Sourcing and Contract Management).
The P2i platform was foundationally designed with a focus on service quality, performance, and accountability for the use of public moneys. With an emphasis on value delivered from social services, the platform can capture aggregated social outcome measures (e.g., the number of service users that have shown improvements in being safe and/or protected from harm) through performance reporting by service providers/NGOs, as well as output measures (e.g., the number of beds for homeless people) and throughput measures (e.g., the number of hours of therapy).
The Infosys team worked collaboratively with the Department to configure the SSP platform customized to the Department’s specialized, varied, and changing needs.
Benefits delivered
The Queensland Government’s Procure to invest (P2i) platform, powered by TradeEdge Social Services Procurement Platform, enabled:
- A single, integrated platform for end-to-end procurement of social services, including all business functions (sourcing, contract lifecycle management, performance management, and payments).
- Increased visibility and uniformity of business processes across departments, service types, and service providers.
- Enabled consistent reporting across services, allowing the Government to measure the performance of social investments and make timely decisions.
- Improved compliance and substantially reduced the potential risk of incorrect or fraudulent payments.
- Easy-to-use supplier (service provider) portal with simplified and automated processes for managing contracts, acquittal processing, and payments, thus empowering service providers to focus on actual service delivery
- Significant improvement in transaction probity with the implementation of better system controls and the automation of several business processes.
