Government | Technology Assessment
City finds opportunities for system integration and modernization – and achieves employee buy-in.
Client Overview
- 316 acres of public park space
- 8,6209 inhabitants
- 68 square miles of city limits
- Significant compliance and audit requirements (EPA and State)
The Challenge
The city had been using a decades-old ERP solution and had not evaluated their business processes at any point during that time. Not only was the current ERP system not the best fit for their municipality, but the city was spending an inordinate amount of money on maintenance costs for customization and did not take advantage of instituting best practices or current technology.
“We held onsite interviews with various city employees so we could understand employees’ business processes and the ‘why’ behind each process. We ensured the inclusion of all necessary participants in order to get a comprehensive view of all scoped areas.” – Vanessa Davison, Managing Director, Panorama Consulting Group
Our Approach
The city requested our assistance in evaluating its existing capabilities. This evaluation involved reviewing the city’s operations in the areas of constituent outreach, utilities, fire department and public works.
As part of this evaluation, we assessed a full list of systems from the city’s IT staff to determine which systems should be migrated into a centralized ERP system and which systems should continue to stand alone as a best of breed.
This IT strategy aligned with current and future requirements, which we gleaned from executive strategy documentation and onsite workshops. We ensured our recommendations enabled the city to simplify business processes, migrate data into one integrated system and achieve its strategic goals.
Additional Services Provided
- Process mapping
- Strategic plan for future state
- Analysis of the capabilities within the government ERP market
- Risk analysis
- Identification of potential software solutions for the city to consider
- Preliminary cost analysis
- Technical fit assessment
- Organizational change management
Preparing Employees Before Implementation Resulted in Lower Implementation Costs
Our organizational change management efforts involved educating stakeholders and users on the broad range of capabilities offered by the new system. We emphasized how these capabilities would allow them to operate more efficiently in a system that fit their needs. Doing this work upfront saved the city money during implementation.
Expected Results
Panorama expects the full implementation of the new ERP system to result in the following benefits:
- Scalability for global expansion
- Reduced IT maintenance costs
- Multi-site/multi-warehouse capabilities
- Support of non-commercial and commercial business workflows
- Integration with Amazon systems and support of multi-level outsourcing
- Reduction in manual tasks and external workarounds
- One integrated system for majority of functional areas
- Data consistency between disparate systems
- Data consistency for budgeting and project tracking
