SingHealth, Singapore’s largest public healthcare group, has completed a payroll modernisation project led by IBM Consulting.
The project migrated SingHealth’s payroll and custom applications from SAP ECC to SAP S/4HANA on a Private RISE model.
The migration makes SingHealth, alongside NHG Health, National University Health System and the Ministry of Health Holdings, the first group of healthcare clusters in Singapore to move to SAP Private RISE.
IBM noted that payroll is one of the most tightly regulated functions in any organisation, subject to statutory requirements including Central Provident Fund contributions, IRAS tax obligations, and compliance policies that are constantly evolving.
The tech giant said running payroll on a legacy platform meant growing exposure to security vulnerabilities and escalating support costs, and increasing compliance risks. These are risks that a public healthcare institution of this scale and responsibility simply cannot afford.
IBM Consulting partnered with SingHealth and its payment processing partner, 1FSS to design and execute a secure migration path that ensured stringent adherence to critical risk and compliance requirements, while ensuring uninterrupted payroll operations for Singapore’s healthcare professionals.
The seamless, end‑to‑end transformation included building a secure, modern payroll infrastructure that integrates with SingHealth’s Human Resource workforce management and finance systems—reducing the risk of data failures and making it faster to onboard new services; and ensuring all payroll processes and data are transferred accurately and without disruption to users.
The project also simplified the system’s core architecture to improve stability, reduce maintenance complexity and costs, and easily adapt to future regulatory and policy changes; established a structured process to continuously incorporate the latest compliance and security updates, safeguarding sensitive employee and payroll data, and reducing the risk of audit findings and regulatory non-compliance; and transformed payroll from a processing function into a platform for insights that supports workforce automation and analytics and enables more informed operational and financial decisions.
Johnny Quah, DGCFO at SingHealth, said the collaboration with IBM Consulting, with the support of Synapxe, enabled them to upgrade their payroll infrastructure without any disruption to our operations.
“This migration to a more modern and robust payroll infrastructure is an important step in strengthening our back-end systems, and we are happy with how the transition was managed,” said Quah.
Abraham Thomas, managing partner of IBM Consulting in ASEAN, said that public healthcare institutions operate under immense pressure to deliver and the systems behind the scenes must be equally resilient.
“As organizations across the region modernise their critical systems, SingHealth’s experience demonstrates that even the most complex migrations can be executed without interruption,” said Thomas.
