After nearly five years of working to install a $2-million software program, city hall expects to fully implement the system later this year, including a virtual city hall for staff and residents.
As part of its Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software program, city administration rolled out the virtual city hall module last year for employees and city council, and, after receiving feedback, made modifications to address any identified issues, said a fourth-quarter report presented during the Feb. 26 regular council meeting.
One issue that users identified was there were roughly 4,000 duplicate customers in the ERP software, which occurred after the implementation of the new tax system, the report continued. The finance department is cleaning up those duplicate accounts before it officially launches the virtual city hall this year.
City hall is also still implementing some modules of the business central software, including reporting, cash management and integrations.
With reporting, there are still several challenges with financial and ad hoc reporting, so the information technology department has developed a path to improve those capabilities. City officials expect to roll out this part soon.
With cash management, officials are still attempting to implement this module, which consists of electronic funds transfers (EFTs) for payment of suppliers and bank reconciliations.
With integrations, city hall is working to integrate the Questica budget module and is monitoring the Central Square module before declaring it fully operational.
City administration is pleased with how well the implementation of the ERP project has progressed, finance director Brian Acker told council.
“It’s been very successful for us. It’s a completely different world for us,” he said.
What city administration noticed this year while performing year-end financial activities is it now has one general ledger where it can find all the financial data, as compared to the last three years when it had to search through several different ledgers, Acker continued.
Officials expect the ERP system to offer staff more efficiencies and make departments’ jobs easier, such as with writing reports, since the system can produce the documents quickly and send them immediately, he remarked.
Virtual city hall was on its way to being implemented but experienced a setback recently after it failed to work as it should have during a test run, Acker said.
“So, it’s back to square one. Once we get that sorted out and have eliminated duplicate (customer names), we’ll be ready to go,” he added.
Smart water meters
City hall is working with Central Square and Neptune Technologies to install 12,500 “smart” water meters in every household and building in the city, and by the end of Q4, had replaced more than 9,000 old devices — over 70 per cent — with new ones.
Installing the new digital water meters will allow city hall to read meters on demand, collect data immediately and input them into the utility billing system, the report said. The utility billing branch is using radio reads of accounts that have the new meters installed, while Neptune can monitor accounts for high consumption.
The next regular council meeting is Monday, March 11.
