Background
In April 2014 the Board of Supervisors approved the implementation of the INFOR Human Resources and Financial Information system. This decision was preceded by approximately 12 months of work performed by a Financial System Readiness Team (FSRT) which was completed in consultation with Government Finance Officer's Association (GFOA). The GFOA assigned consultant specialized in assisting local governments in selecting Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Systems.
The County of Yolo created an implementation team which implemented the Payroll and Human Resources modules in April 2015, approximately 4 months behind schedule. The team then implemented the Financial modules in November 2015, also about 4 months behind schedule. At that time, the County selected to implement Version 10 of the software, which was the latest commercial release available. The County chose to implement Version 10 as a single-tenant hosted solution with the hosting managed remotely by INFOR using Amazon Web Services. Following the initial implementation, County staff have taken various steps to improve the functioning of the INFOR system with a significant effort in 2017 to improve the accounting structure and to better align with the system's design. Additionally, in 2018, Work Force Management (timekeeping module) was put into production. County staff started a significant effort to ramp up improvements to the system in the 2019-20 fiscal year meant to implement various modules of the system that, based on limited staff capacity during initial implementation, did not occur (Contracts Management and Talent management).
The staggered pace of implementation was not unexpected as an ERP system typically takes as much as five years to work toward full system utilization and to make improvements to enhance the functioning of the system. However, the efforts in the 2019-20 fiscal year were brought to an abrupt halt in early 2020 when County Financial and Human Resources staff were pulled in to support the County's response to the COVID-19 public health emergency. As the pandemic has progressed, it has exacerbated several issues with the INFOR system that were known but more manageable in an office environment. Thus, as the pandemic began to stabilize, the County INFOR Steering Committee engaged in conversations with INFOR, beginning in fall 2020, on how to maximize the value of the system, which led to the value engineering process described below.
Value Engineering
The value engineering process began in September 2020 and concluded in March 2021. During this time period, consultants from INFOR reviewed the County's operation and utilization of the current version of INFOR and met with staff from all key functional areas including but not limited to Procurement, Finance, and Human Resources, and certain departments considered to be super-users (such as Health and Human Services).
The intent of the value engineering project was to identify the pain points involved in the current system and to determine whether the value of the County's previous investments could be maximized through improvements to the current system or could be achieved more expediently through a system upgrade to move to the latest version of the software, presently called Version 11 or CloudSuite. The attached presentation from INFOR (Attachment A) demonstrates the conclusion of the Value Engineering process that was shared with key personnel and the INFOR Steering committee and was shaped by significant amounts of time and demonstrations performed by senior INFOR consulting staff. The results demonstrate several pain points that exist in the current system summarized below:
- Paperless Office - The current version of INFOR is a primarily paper-based system. Although the County has been able to integrate paperless processes in a few select areas by connecting to external network drives, the processes are not fully integrated. While this has functioned in the past, it does not work well given the level of remote work being performed by finance and other operational staff throughout the organization.
- Advanced Visibility and Reporting - The current version of INFOR is cumbersome to report against and difficult to use for users that are not highly trained financial personnel. Version 11 has simplified reporting, near-time transaction posting, self-service business intelligence, and dash-boards that provides significant time savings on reporting. Enhanced reporting will allow us to centralize information from multiple parts of the value chain into a single point.
- Modern Business Platform - The new version allows for significantly improved data integration with other 3rd party applications to reduce duplicate work occurring in external (non-ERP) systems as well as to improve upon workflows to improve the County's business and financial operations, reducing the amount of manual, routine work.
- Cloud-Based (Software-as-a-Service) System - The current version of INFOR requires significant employee effort performing maintenance and patching due to the County being in a single-tenant environment and thus responsible for ensuring compatibility of different modules and systems within the ERP. There is the added complexity of needing to ensure the patches do not break any existing configurations prior to deployment. Thus the County has spent significant resources on maintenance rather than improvement. The cloud-based version will allow new features and required patches to be pushed into the County's environment after vendor testing. Issues will be fixed promptly due to the whole customer base being in the same environment. This will allow precious County resources to be spent on improving rather than maintaining.
As part of the value engineering, INFOR performed a calculation of the value that they believe is delivered by the upgrade compared to the present version of the system. These types of return on investment calculations are better suited to the commercial sector rather than the public sector; however, they do serve as one indicator to consider in this type of upgrade project. INFOR's estimate is that the County could find value from the upgrade of up to $2.2 million per year . While the Steering Committee thinks this number is likely overstating the benefit, staff believe there is significant value in moving forward with the upgrade as discussed below.
Upgrade Plan and Projected Cost
The Steering Committee has put forth the following plan and cost projection in order to perform the upgrade of the INFOR System. The full cost of the upgrade is not before the Board today but would come to the Board of Supervisors for approval as part of the Fiscal Year 2021-22 Recommended Budget.
Upgrade Plan
The Steering Committee has been in active planning for the upgrade since April 2021. The Steering Committee has been developing a timeline and project team in order to successfully accomplish the upgrade and to apply lessons learned from the prior implementation. Fortunately, many of the key staff that performed the prior implementation are still available to assist, which puts the County in an excellent position to have the technical knowledge needed to perform the upgrade successfully. Here are some of the key dates (not all-inclusive), which will be finalized once an implementation consultant is selected:
- May 24, 2021 - Selection of County ERP Manager (County staff position)
- June 8, 2021 - Update on INFOR to the Board of Supervisors
- June 15, 2021 - Request for project funding in the 2021-22 Budget
- June 29, 2021 - Target date for bringing back implementation consultant agreement to INFOR
- July-September, 2021 - Planning and Business Process Mapping
- October-December, 2021 - Design phase
- January-May, 2021 - Development and Testing phase
- June, 2022 - End User Training and Data Conversion
- July 1, 2022 - Target go-live date
- July-September 2022 - Post go-live Support
Software as a Solution (SAAS) Costs
The County presently pays $431,135 in annual support and maintenance for the INFOR financial system version 10 in a hosted environment. Based on information provided by INFOR on cost estimates, the County expects the following costs moving forward with the upgrade project. These costs are lower in the first year however do increase over time (similar to our current cost structure):
| Year |
Cost |
| 1 |
$410,000 |
| 2 |
$469,964 |
| 3 |
$475,817 |
| 4 |
$490,092 |
| 5 |
$504,794 |
The Chief Financial Officer, Chief Technology Officer and County Counsel are presently in negotiation with INFOR, Inc. (Current version included in Attachment C) to ensure the terms of the agreement are acceptable to the County and that the agreements provide for sufficient licensing to ensure all needs are met through the SAAS agreement.
Thus, staff are requesting authorization from the Board to have authority to execute the agreement in a final form approved by County Counsel. The system costs would be recovered annually through Information Technology Charges which are allocated across all departments on a Full-Time Equivalent (FTE) basis. This process would continue in the future.
Implementation Costs
The implementation costs to perform the upgrade are two-part in nature.
The first implementation cost is for the implementation consultant which were projected in the value engineering. The County of Yolo has a solicitation out for CloudSuite Implementation and Migration Services which was posted on May 9, 2021 and will close on June 7, 2021. The implementation consultant will be responsible for guiding and ensuring that the implementation occurs successfully and timely and will be experienced with CloudSuite implementations. The County will review respondents and evaluate to select the firm that provides the best value to the County.
The second part of the implementation costs is for staffing needed to supplement the team which will be performing the implementation for the County. An overview of the projected team and resources are included as Attachment B. The Infor Steering Committee agreed that to maximize the success of the project, it would be best to include 5 new limited term positions in the upcoming budget to serve as backfill to allow the County's most experienced personnel to participate on the project team. The positions to be backfilled would be (1) Payroll position, (1) Human Resource position, (2) Accounting positions, and (1) Procurement position.
The total projected upgrade cost in Fiscal Year 2021-22 is $2.036 million which includes the two parts discussed above, which is expected to be funded by $500,000 of prior INFOR general fund contract commitments that will be rolled forward to this project, $851,000 of Accumulated Capital Outlay Funding, and approximately $685,000 of General Fund Fund Balance.
Recommendation and Next Steps
Staff's recommendation is for the Board to authorize the Chief Technology Officer to execute the agreement with INFOR, Inc. for the CloudSuite Software as a Service not to exceed $500,000 annually. This would allow INFOR to begin to provision the County's environment to begin the project and would start the transition from the hosted environment to the cloud environment.
In order for the project to be successful, the items requested related to the project would also need approval at the Recommended Budget hearing. As described above, staff expect to bring back a contract for an Implementation Consultant at the June 29, 2021 meeting to start work in July 2021. If this item is approved, staff will begin to work on backfilling positions in order to ensure the success of the project to modernize the County's INFOR ERP System.
|