Centrelink's Pega-based payments engine is live

Services Australia’s entitlements calculation engine (ECE) project is nearing its conclusion.

The project will let Services Australia retire the mainframe-based system that currently handles entitlement calculations for payments administered by Centrelink.

Services Australia’s chief information and digital officer Charles McHardie told senate estimates that the ECE moved into production in October last year before being used in a "shadow mode" from November.

“We can do entitlement calculations on aged pension claims," he said.

“We turned [the ECE] on in shadow mode in November,” he said, using the Pegasystem platform provided by Infosys.

The ECE - based on a Pega platform deployed and configured by Infosys - continues to run in parallel with the existing mainframe-based engine, and McHardie said the agency is assessing results from the two systems running side-by-side.

Currently, Services Australia plans to continue using ECE in shadow mode until March 2023.

The whole project is scheduled to wind up at the end of the financial year, McHardie said.

McHardie also revealed that while Infosys continued working on the project, on November 16 2021 Services Australia renegotiated the contract to make itself the prime systems integrator, retaining Infosys on a “time and materials” basis.

By that time, the ECE project was already over time, something which Services Australia CEO Rebecca Skinner said was a common experience in Australian Public Service projects of this nature.

“Most agencies migrating their key calculation engine off old [mainframe] code have run over time,” Skinner said.

In taking over as prime contractor, McHardie said, Services Australia assumed responsibility “to deliver the ECE end-to-end.”

As recently as July 2022, Services Australia hoped work on the ECE would be complete by September 2022.

In January 2022, iTnews reported the Infosys contract had netted the company at least $135.4 million since the initial proof-of-design work commenced in 2019.