County cleans up ‘a hot mess’ with cloud-based ERP and HR systems
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By challenging “the way we always did it” and traditional procurement strategies, Dauphin County will replace manual, time-consuming processes with more efficient, problem-solving solutions.
Right now, it takes four people four days to ensure that Dauphin County, Pennsylvania’s 1,700 employees get paid. But next summer, it will take 45 minutes.
The county is replacing its outdated enterprise resource planning (ERP) and human resources systems with Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP and Oracle Fusion Cloud Human Capital Management (HCM) software and expects to go live on June 23, 2023.
“That’s basically tomorrow in IT land,” said Elizabeth Parry, the county’s chief information officer, but the work is well underway – and very needed.
To get their jobs done, county workers “had to download spreadsheets and manually pull pieces of information out of systems and put them all together to get a report. You couldn’t even say, ‘What’s the budgeted number for this thing?’ or ‘What were the payroll hours for this person?’” Parry said. “On the HR side, the payroll component is a hot mess, if there’s any way to put it. It takes four people four days to input payroll to get the county paid, which is an insane amount of work. It’s a lot of manual entry; there’s nothing automated about it.”
Another example: When employees got a cost-of-living increase, the HR team had to go into each employee’s record, calculate the raise and change pay rate. “Now, it’s just download a spreadsheet, change the number, upload a spreadsheet and away you go,” Parry said. “The efficiencies are really just going to make our lives a whole lot easier. We’re going to spend less time trying to figure out how to get the information in or out of the system and just being able to do what we need to do to make it happen.”
The requisition process is also getting a makeover. Currently, employees send paper invoices to the controller’s office with a code and a request for payment. With the new system, the employees will be able to submit them online themselves.
That element of self-service will make a huge difference in payroll efficiency, too, Parry said. Historically, every department has had an employee who gathers workers’ hours and enters them into a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet to send to HR. The new system will let workers manage their own timesheets.
These efficiencies mean employees will have more time to work on more important tasks. For instance, the controller’s office will be able to work on checks and balances of funds instead of shuffling paper, and HR can focus on activities like recruiting events.
The IT staff will “get to do all the other projects that the departments want us to help with,” Parry said. For example, “we were printing the payroll checks in IT. I don’t know how that happened. That was before I got here [in 2019]. So, we’re not going to do that anymore.”
Parry attributes the success of making these changes to two things. First is her philosophy.
“My team here at the county has taken great strides in saying, ‘This is the way we’ve always done it’ is a bad phrase,” she said. “When you start a project like this, get a T-shirt that has ‘This is the way we’ve always done it’ with a circle and a line through it. If you can [convince] people to get off of that … and really question what’s behind it, that makes something like this a whole lot easier.”
Second is a shift in the procurement approach. Rather than issuing a request for proposals for ERP and HCM systems, she met with the finance and HR departments, learned about their daily, quarterly and yearly processes and then told the vendors: “This is what we need to solve for.”
“They had to show, ‘This is how you would process your payroll and this is how you would onboard an employee,’” Parry said. Five companies held demonstrations, and the county opted for Oracle last fall.
For other state and local agencies looking to take on similar revamps, she recommends asking departments to show a law, regulation or policy requiring that something be done a certain way. If they can’t produce one, they can adapt to change.
“It was eye-opening for a lot of folks,” Parry said of forcing new perspectives. “I think this is really going to turn us upside-down on our heads in a good way.”
Stephanie Kanowitz is a freelance writer based in northern Virginia.