Phased ERP implementation: the City of Des Moines experience.

• Author: Riper, Kevin
• Position: Enterprise resource planning, Des Moines, IA

In 1997 the City of Des Moines needed to address its Y2K problem with its financial management information system, which consisted of integrated modules for general ledger, accounts payable, and accounts receivable on the city's mainframe. While the city had long used an automated payroll system, written in COBOL and maintained in-house on the same mainframe, the rest of the city's financial and human resources processes were manual.

The Case for Action

Purchase orders were produced on an IBM Selectric typewriter. Personnel records for the city's nearly 2,000 full-time employees were recorded by hand on 8-1/2 [inches] x 14 [inches] card stock. Hours worked by employees were entered three times every two weeks: once on an employee's individual timesheet, a second time on a consolidated divisional timesheet on greenbar paper, and a third time in the mainframe by a data-entry operator. Fixed assets and employee benefits were tracked by a mixture of paper and Excel spreadsheets. Tracking half a billion dollars in operating and capital expenditures annually also required numerous manual interfaces [ILLUSTRATION FOR EXHIBIT 1 OMITTED].

A citywide information technology task force had recommended (and the city manager and city council had endorsed) a policy decision to decentralize the collection, distribution, and possession of as much enterprise information as possible, all on a new citywide client/server network. Staff in all departments were growing increasingly impatient devoting many unproductive hours to guiding, delivering, and tracking the paperwork that flowed between them and the departments of finance and human resources. This and other business practices frustrating to the city's operating departments led each department to place at least one representative on a 30-member financial/human resources software user advisory group - led by the finance department that created a request for qualifications (RFQ) for new enterprise software based on the following precept:

"The city's general objective for this financial/accounting and payroll/human resources project is to jettison as many existing systems as possible (whether currently automated or manual) and their associated business practices and workflows. Furthermore, they will be replaced with the best available software package and the underlying business practices and workflows that come with that package. In other words, the city anticipates adopting the 'best practices' and workflows embodied in the software package selected."

The resulting RFQ was a slim document, [TABULAR DATA OMITTED] listing only three pages of mandatory features, and four pages of desirable features. A four-month selection process produced a decision in February 1998 to accept a joint proposal from a leading enterprise software vendor and its implementation partner.

Once the vendor installed the enterprise software on two new servers and key employees received introductory training at various vendor training locations around the country, the project kicked off formally in April 1998. As executive sponsor of the enterprise software project, the city manager announced to representatives from all city departments, the software vendor, and the implementation partner, "This is the most important information technology project for the City of Des Moines at this or any other time. We desperately need distributed processing and reporting of financial and human resources transactions, so that program managers have at their desktops the information they need to run their businesses effectively. Also, the whole city will be watching this project as an example for future projects that our information technology plan calls for."

Project Expectation and Structure

Faced with the certain breakdown on June 30, 1999, of the legacy financial software on the mainframe, the city manager and project steering committee set aggressive "go-live" deadlines of December 1, 1998, for phase one of the new financial modules (general ledger, accounts payable, and purchasing) and January 1, 1999, for phase one of the human resources modules (payroll, employee benefits, and human resources). These eight- and nine-month project schedules were contrary to the advice of both the software vendor and the implementation partner, who provided statistics showing that average implementation takes 11 to 15 months for either financials, or human resources, let alone both simultaneously.

Nevertheless, with seven functional specialists from the finance and human resources departments devoted full-time to the project, complemented...