Financial Management and Assurance Costing Model expansion

⁠⁠⁠Overview

The Department of Health, Disability and Ageing requires access to specialist costing model services through a time and materials arrangement to enhance, refine and expand its existing costing framework.

About

The current cost model framework supports each branch within the Financial Management and Assurance Division (FMAD) and the Executives by:

• Providing an evidence base for annual funding allocations and deriving causes of variations in budget versus actual funding
• Determining cost of services and ensuring service recoveries (where relevant) are aligned
• Providing efficient cost recovery processes
• Forecasting future year resource requirements to inform workforce planning

Purpose

The engagement will provide continuity of technical expertise and ensure the department can efficiently respond to emerging business requirements, organisational changes, new service offerings and future expansion of costing activities across the division and broader department. The department will maintain and build upon an established, scalable costing framework that supports transparent and evidence-based financial management across FMAD and the wider department, ensuring access to specialised expertise and technical resources to continuously enhance, refine and expand the costing framework as organisational priorities, service offerings and business requirements evolve.

Scope

The primary deliverable is specialist support using existing costing models and the established framework, at the request of the department. The supplier will provide specialist technical resources on a time and materials basis to one or more of the following:

• Add new services and activities to existing models
• Expand costing capability beyond FMAD
• Incorporate organisational and operational changes
• Support enhancements requested by business stakeholders
• Refine costing methodologies and assumptions
• Maintain and optimise model performance
• Provide advice on future costing and pricing initiatives
• Develop a structured approach to better understand the costs, benefits and return on investment (ROI) associated with investment opportunities, including AI and automation, across the division and department
• Establish baseline service delivery costs, effort and resource requirements to assess comparisons for proposed transformation initiatives
• Incorporate capability to model productivity gains, resource reallocation and service demand changes arising from automation and AI adoption
• Develop a structured approach to identifying the resources, effort and cost associated with key capabilities and functions
• Enable future workforce planning, benchmarking, service delivery and departmental activities through a consistent capability-based costing framework

Knowledge Transfer and Documentation

• Update existing operating procedures, technical documentation and user guides to align with model changes and enhancements
• Provide targeted user support and guidance to departmental staff on the operation, maintenance and administration of the costing models where required

Enquiries

Buyer contact: valerie.ng@health.gov.au