Developments

At VITAL, we strive to improve our systems and processes to deliver corporate shared services to public agencies and officers efficiently.

Digitising Personnel Files

Until recently, the personnel records of public officers were documented and stored in hardcopy. Storage of these records and processing of personnel movements or changes was cumbersome as it involved handling voluminous amounts of paper and files.

In step with the Digital Government initiative, VITAL has begun digitising Personnel Files for the Ministries/Departments/Organs of State since April 2017. This Electronic Personnel Files (ePfile) service is also being extended to Statutory Boards progressively.

Digitised personnel records enhance the confidentiality and security of the information stored therein through electronic access rights management and audit logs of document modification. The digital records also facilitate data management and retrieval.

Simplifying Transport Claims for Work Trips

With just a few taps on smartphone, public officers can now commute for work hassle-free on taxis and private hire cars island-wide in Singapore using the Virtual CabCharge and Grab-for-Work mobile apps.

Both CabCharge and Grab-for-Work offer cashless payment options that enable public officers to bill their taxi / private hire car fares for official work trips directly to their agencies and eliminate the effort on the officers’ part to submit transport claims.

Using analytics dashboards developed by VITAL populated with travel data, agencies can reduce the manual effort in reviewing and verifying transport claims and expenditure. At the same time, agencies can gain insights into staff travel patterns and identify erroneous claims or exception payments.

This is a collaboration between VITAL and Public Service Division, Smart Nation and Digital Government Office and Accountant General’s Department, as well as Cabcharge Asia Pte Ltd and GrabTaxi Pte Ltd.

Whole-Of-Government Corporate Systems

As the Central Agency for Corporate Services supporting Ministries, Statutory Boards and Organs of States, VITAL is also part of the team working alongside PSD and AGD to co-develop the new Central HR and Payroll administration systems (Cumulus and HRP) to meet the changing needs of Whole-Of-Government.

In preparation for the transition, we have been partnering ministries and agencies in their change journey through a series of communication and engagement sessions to share key changes in processes, in addition to end-to-end support for a smooth and streamlined transition.

With our experiences and institutional knowledge, we can better understand, anticipate and offer suggestions to system owners to agencies’ challenges and concerns to harmonize processes. With the knowledge gathered in workshops, training, tests, and the eventual roll-out, we are also able to render effective support to our partners after the system go-live and aid the transition of their legacy systems seamlessly to the new environment.

Robotics Process Automation

In line with Singapore Government’s Smart Nation initiative, VITAL has been actively pursuing digitalisation of our existing operations, and adoption of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) was the natural next step towards transforming into a digitally-enabled Shared Services Centre.

VITAL was an early adopter of RPA in the Public Service in 2017. We started by piloting the use of RPA across HR, Payroll, Finance and Procurement processes and subsequently scaling up RPA adoption within VITAL including trial on unattended robots. Recognising the importance of nurturing potential ops-tech talents with job-relevant digital skills (in automation), VITAL also equipped our officers with RPA skills and created portals to share RPA resources and best practices to propagate adoption of RPA within VITAL and across the Public Service.

In 2020, VITAL was appointed as Whole of Government Robotics & Automation (R&A) lead agency for corporate and administrative services to experiment and scale suitable and promising R&A solutions that could be helpful for Singapore’s Public Service. This is an important endorsement of VITAL’s essential role as Singapore Government Shared Services Centre and capabilities in R&A for corporate and administrative services in Public Service.