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By Andy McCue, 23 June 2004 10:55

NEWS The UK's Health and Safety Executive (HSE) is to spend £28m rolling out a new PeopleSoft system that will support frontline operational safety inspectors.

The seven-year deal will see the HSE use PeopleSoft's field service, ESA, enterprise portal and data warehouse modules, with full deployment due to begin in October once the project gets its final green light from the Office of Government Commerce.

The HSE had been running various ageing bespoke systems and went out to competition last September. A PeopleSoft prototype has been running since January.

Neil Goldsmith, project manager at the HSE, told silicon.com it is a massive project with upfront costs of £8m, while the £28m total is for the seven year lifecycle of the project including software licences, systems integration and training.

"It is a highly significant implementation for the HSE. As it is for our operational staff, it is extremely important we get it right," he said.

Goldsmith admitted that will be no mean feat, with 10,500 data sources from 18 systems being reduced to just 3,600.

"We wanted to reduce the amount of data being collected and there is a large proportion of duplicates in that. There are some serious complexities."

The scale of the project means the rollout will be staged, with the past three years' data going into the live system and data up to seven years old going into the data warehouse, with a rolling refresh to ensure operational staff have access to all the data.

Financial benefits are expected to be in the region of only £1m, largely from reduced support costs from managing 18 different systems, but Goldsmith said there are more important qualitative and productivity benefits that will come from the technology.

"The 360-degree view of our 350 top companies we monitor is what sold it to the users," he said. "We need to be able to know what we've done and to be able to pull all that together for top-level meetings. When our director general is in front of Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight, we want that data there."