More efficient, lower cost, better accuracy. Fronde delivers EPL’s Oracle Stack upgrade

Education Payroll Ltd (EPL) is responsible for paying approximately 100,000 teachers and support staff at 2,500 New Zealand schools every fortnight.

EPL recognised the need to upgrade its Oracle Stack 11G to an up-to-date, fully supported online version of its payroll and pay run components as part of a staged technology upgrade over ten years to ensure its systems work efficiently and consistently.

With a long-standing successful working partnership, EPL engaged the team at Fronde to deliver the multi-million dollar upgrade.

As well as enhancing accuracy and the user experience, the upgrade aimed to deliver efficiency and security improvements, and be more cost effective.

“Whatever we wanted to do for the future was constrained by the current technology platform, so we knew we had to mitigate that risk today,” explains Mark Dwight, EPL’s General Manager of Service Development. EPL felt confident that Fronde was the right team for the job.

“Fronde has developed a deep knowledge of the support systems that run the payroll, and EPL felt confident that they had the capability to successfully partner with EPL to deliver the project,” says Dwight.

Starting January 2021, Fronde upgraded EPL’s Oracle Stack with an emphasis on simplification, reliability and risk reduction, including automating the environment builds.

Warwick Taggart, Fronde’s Head of Delivery says there was a ‘one team’ approach with open and honest conversations to drive the right outcome for EPL.

“This was a large complex project with both hardware and software components requiring upgrading. Partnering with EPL meant Fronde was able to understand the business context driving EPL’s decisions throughout the life of the project.”

Fronde understood EPL’s need to keep the scope of the project tight. Ensuring a “laser-like” focus on delivering the upgrade efficiently and effectively, the project was completed six months early and under budget. Completing the upgrade allowed EPL to switch off Novopay Online and transition all schools to the EdPay online portal in November 2021.

EPL has cited numerous benefits, including improved timeliness, efficiency, resiliency, cost-savings, customer satisfaction and payroll accuracy. The upgrade has provided significant improvements to EPL’s user experience, including a noted decrease in the amount of time school payroll administrators spend using the system.

Dwight says they are pleased with Fronde’s expertise during the complex job and their outstanding quality of work.

“Fronde is knowledgeable and dedicated and will do what is necessary to help us succeed. We appreciate the skills and the culture of their business, and we know they have a genuine commitment to us and getting our project over the line.”

As a result of the upgrade, EPL has now been able to commence further process and technology infrastructure upgrades.

“This supported version of the Oracle Stack gives us the basis to execute the rest of our strategy to modernise the rest of the environment,” Dwight says.

Fronde is now working with EPL on phase two of the project, where we are decommissioning the remaining legacy systems, with reduced operational costs and improved security posture.

Why Fronde?

With 30 years of experience within IT across New Zealand and Australia and a team of 100+ people, we’re here to support you as you transform your business.

We’re outcomes-focused, agile, responsive and provide trusted and insightful results. We are attentive to our customer’s unique processes and immerse ourselves into their business, adapting as needed along the way.

Our philosophy is simple: partner with the world’s best, be fully present, and keep it simple — so you can get to a better future, faster.

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