Government of New Brunswick enhances public services with Oracle Cloud

The Government of New Brunswick (GNB) oversees the Canadian province on the Eastern seaboard of North America. Government leaders wanted access to timely, standardized data, to enable them to analyze organizational risks and opportunities, and make decisions based on consistent, reliable information. At the same time, leaders wanted to increase operational efficiency and improve government services. They knew that streamlining processes and unifying data across its diverse  organizations was crucial.

Until recently, GNB relied on multiple heavily customized, on-premises applications, with limited integration across organizations. How information in these applications was logged and maintained over time varied from organization to organization. Also, human resources and payroll processes were managed using outdated systems that were largely paper-based. Additionally, the need to comply with more than 20 collective bargaining agreements, that were constantly being updated, added to the complexity of delivering payroll to more than 30,000 government employees.

GNB sought a comprehensive back-office solution to enable a common, enterprise-wide approach to how it manages data, processes, and technology. Leaders consulted with organizations such as Gartner and Infotech to identify best practices, and drew on the experience of senior GNB employees who had previously worked on digital and business transformations.

With the scale, impact, and multiyear timeline of the project, GNB focused on securing leadership buy-in from the outset. The organization selected the technology solution and implementation partner separately, to ensure the best organizational fit. After an extensive and competitive selection process, two solution vendors were shortlisted for further review and negotiation, based on an in-depth internal requirements analysis. Oracle Cloud scored highest. Key criteria included the system’s structure, dual-language capabilities, total cost of ownership, and flexibility for configuration.

GNB gained efficiencies, minimized risks, and enhanced services by implementing Oracle Cloud Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Oracle Cloud Human Capital Management (HCM) as a unified and transparent back-office platform. It also allowed the province to consolidate IT strategies and harmonize processes for thousands of government employees across diverse government organizations—including transportation and infrastructure, social development education, early childhood development, and women’s equality.

Reporting became simpler while managers gained easier access to data and, in turn, made more-informed decisions. For example, there is now a single source of information on all government suppliers. New data standards reduced duplicate supplier information. The province also streamlined a range of HR processes using Oracle Cloud HCM, and simplified payroll processing by implementing collective agreements in Oracle Payroll.

Employees can manage their own HR data, including updating their personal details or having payroll split deposits among different bank accounts.

With a single, enterprise-wide solution, GNB managed security and privacy risks across the organization, and employed a robust risk management methodology to ensure employees and leaders always had secure access to government information.

Using Oracle Cloud applications allowed GNB to spend less time patching, maintaining, and upgrading heavily customized, on-premises applications across the province. This ultimately results in cost savings to the government.