Travis County Commissioners Court
Tuesday, December 7, 2010,
Items 11, 12 & 13
Now let's call back to order the voting session of the Travis County Commissioners' court.
Commissioner Eckhardt will join us as soon as she can.
and this morning we indicated our intention to call up items 11, 12 and 13 either together or one right after the other.
let's try 12 first.
12 is to consider and take appropriate action on the following regarding better enterprise financial information for Travis County otherwise known by all as befit.
a, project one-time budget costs.
b, project ongoing budget item costs.
and c, data center requirements.
and we indicate that the Davis center may be discuss understand executive session under the consultation with attorney and the security exceptions.
good afternoon.
>> afternoon, judge.
thank you very much.
just to introduce the people sitting here.
cyd grimes, the county purchasing agent.
next to her is mike woodburn, the project director for be fit and next to me is joe hollow, the executive manager for communications and susan (indiscernible), Travis County auditor.
it seems like we've been working on this project a long time, but we're coming today really at the end of the procurement process and to make a recommendation to the court and ask for your support financially for the system.
and I will turn it over to cyd grimes, purchasing agent.
>> I think we need to pull up 13 as well,, judge, at the same time, because we're going to do a presentation that covers both.
>> okay.
13 is to approve contract awards for the enterprise resource planning erp financial system software and services, r.f.p.
number p 090255-lc to the high-ranking proposer team.
a, labyrinth solutions inc., d/b/a lsi consulting.
and sap public services inc.
when you call them sap --
>> it's not a good thing.
>> [ laughter ]
>> judge, Commissioners, several years ago I asked our county auditor when she was thinking about retiring.
and she told me that she could not retire until she got Travis County a new financial accounting system.
as you know our current system is over 20 years old.
by today's standards it is an tick with a dated.
it is stone age technology.
the software at that time cost about $100,000.
and susan and staff have done a great job on keeping that system lunning all these -- running all these years.
the county was much less smaller and much less complicated to operate and run and track financially back then.
shame on me, but I guess I got the auditor to thinking, and for the past three and a half years she has been getting us ready for this new financial system.
when I say get us ready, I mean really getting us ready.
for over three years ago she sent a core group of folks to training to begin learning what was even out there.
the systems we have used are so old that we didn't each know how good we could actually be.
she put together a crack team.
a lot of them you will meet today, to oversee and guide this project, which we call be delete fit.
she advocated for the resources to ensure a successful project.
she said cid, we can't make the same mistakes that we have in the past buying these large financial systems or large software that we buy.
she directed us to research the best practices in our respective areas,st, hr, audit, purchasing.
she challenged us to talk to the other entities to learn the do's and don't's of implementing a new system, what mistakes not to make, how to plan for it, an she made us clearly define and sit down and think about what we needed versus what we wanted in a system, and that effort resulted in a very lengthy and exren active r.f.p.
-- comprehensive r.f.p.
she has kept you and other elected officials aware of the project and included their staff when appropriate.
so with susan's emphasis on success and her planning strategy we have put together the most well planned and well researched procurement that we have ever done.
so whether she knows it or not, she is the befit champion.
and if you approve our actions today, and our requests today, she must now continue to lead us, dragging, kicking and screaming -- I mean motivating us to get through the implementation plan.
so I知 going to turn it over to to san and we have a presentation that thoroughly explains the process that we went through.
>> you've never been that nice to me before.
it just made me really suspicious, do you know what I mean?
just starting out.
>> [ laughter ] what we're going to do today is the people that are working on the team are going to make the presentation for you.
and behind us, raise your hand, are many of the people that have been working behind the scenes from the various offices.
many from auditor's office and other offices.
this has been a very extensive project in terms of people working on it.
and you're going to meet kind of our key players here, but I want to not forget to thank barbara wilson, who has done just an outstanding job in a very complex contract.
and she worked with dean harvey, who was an attorney that we contracted with to work with her on this.
and they did just a really nice job in putting the contract together.
laurie clyde was the lead.
where is laurie?
on the purchasing side, and she was working on negotiations and worked very hard through the whole process.
I値l introduce the other people that were the key part of the team when they come up here.
but it is certainly been a group effort and it has taken everyone working very hard.
in a way we were finally relieved when the start was over and we could get this approve, but now we start implementing it and bringing the system online and that's really the exciting part.
so with that if christina and crew will come up here --
>>
>> [inaudible - no mic].
>> and we have representatives from the vendor, which we will introduce later.
mike of course is the project director.
next to him is christina adair, who has been the project manager and will of course continue to be the project manager.
next to her is donna scarborough and she is the change manager.
one of the things that we have in the contract is a large change management section, but we have someone at Travis County that's working with it as well.
robin wright is the person passing out things and she is the lead financial person in the procurement process.
so there are many people that worked very hard on this, but these are kind of our core key people, and they're going to make the presentation today.
>> last but not least, andrea roth, who is our payroll hr lead.
>> and I知 going to introduce david later.
but he's its's person if you want to raise your hand.
these are people that really really kind of doing everything.
okay.
ladies?
>> good afternoon, Commissioners.
we're very pleased to be here this afternoon.
we have a brief presentation for you.
in reviewing or getting prepared for this presentation, one of the things I did since I wasn't part of the team when this whole concept was started, is I went back and reviewed a previous work session about 18 months ago that the team presented to y'all.
and there were two messages that came through to me from the presentation.
one was the court said we want no surprises.
so when you come back, we want no surprises.
the other thing was that you had indicated in moving forward with the project you wanted a collaborative effort.
so in that spirit today we've developed this presentation we think that reflects and we'll be able to communicate to you that -- to the extent possible there are no surprises and that it was a collaborative effort.
our goal today for the predges is to really answer five questions.
one, what were the evaluation process results?
two, what will the project cost be in terms of one time and ongoing costs?
three, what are we getting for the cost?
four, how do we ea sure success and five, what actions are we asking the court to take today?
in answering the first question, it was a very rigorous process.
and if you look at the diagram at the top we started out -- date before I came back to the county we received nine proposals.
eight of them were judged responsive.
and we went through phase one of the evaluation process, which was an evaluation of the written proposals.
and as part of that, the purpose of that was really to narrow the number of proposers who would be invited to do phase two, which was the demonstration of software among other items. Our focus in phase one was to identify the proposers with the greatest value providing a technical solution for Travis County, one that best met our business and technical requirements.
I must emphasize that cost was not part of phase one.
that is part of the phase two evaluation.
we looblgd at it -- we looked at it in order to get some benchmark idea of what the project cost would be, but it was not evaluated as such.
it was very rilg russ.
we had many participants in the process.
there were cross collaboration, we had multidisciplinary teams and also subject matter experts from many departments providing us input.
there were 10,000 points that were awarded in that, so it was very rigorous and it was both qualitytative and quantitative methods that we used.
at the end of phase one we elevated to proposer teams, that was cherry road oracle and ellis isap, and those were the top two motion carries on a vote of seven to zeroers.
in phase two it was equally rigorous.
there were 11,000 points we evaluated and awarded and that was for demonstrations, costs, team interviews, team and company references and their adherence or acceptance of the county's contract terms. As part of the process, as many of your staff will remember, we invited and had over 200 county staff attending the demonstrations from all size departments large and small.
in addition to that we invited subject matter experts to give us specific input related to their area of expertise.
so for example people from the treasurer's office gave us debt and treasury information as well as a cash investment manager.
tnr provided us feedback on fleet management, pbo on budget related.
so we had a lot of collaboration during that process and a lot of good feedback.
in terms of evaluating the cost, we used a formula driven model.
we asked for not only one time costs, but ongoing costs.
we did an apples to apples comparison.
we also evaluated in terms of the resources, the quantity and skill sets needed to support the system long-term.
we did something very different and innovative in terms of our contracts.
in this r.f.p.
we actually developed contracts that were issued with the r.f.p.
that were specific for technology.
and we asked the vendors how well they would be willing to adhere to our contract terms. It was an eval wailings factor, which I think is a first for Travis County that it was considered an evaluation factor, and we prenegotiated both -- with both vendors in phase two on this area.
and as a result, we were able to have very well-defined, very specific contracts where we tied payments to payment terms. We had very minimal and insignificant material changes to our contracts as far as the implementer's agreement, and we have acceptance criteria we tied to (indiscernible).
so those were all very positive things that happened as a result of that approach.
as a result of that, the team we're recommending to you today was the top ranked team, which was lsi and zap.
andlsi and sap.
so that was what were the results of the see ral waition.
we're now going to move into what does the project cost?
and the costs that we're presenting to you are in the spirit of no surprises, meaning we're not just going to bring you what the one time costs of acquiring an ip implementit are, but what are the costs for a 10 year period.
those costs were provided by the proposers.
having said that, there is a caveat that we'll cover in the next slide slide related to ongoing support of this system.
this slide represents, if you will, the total cost of ownership components and we've divided them into kind of three categories of costs.
the bottom layer of the pyramid, the supporting platform, relates to the acquisition and ongoing support of the underlying infrastructure, if you will.
that's the system hardware and software, the servers as well as the windows operating systems and other things.
the infrastructure and data center is the place you house it as well as the network and network security.
appeared then the hardware and software maintenance is the cost we pay when we acquire hardware or software to maintain those items. And for county the guidelines are five years for hardware, three years for software and then equipment replacement every five years.
the erp software, what we mean by erp is enterprise resource planning and that is the application software itself.
that's sap software.
and the one time cost for that are software licenses and the implementation services to implement the software.
the ongoing costs are related to the soft waiver maintenanceof the application software itself.
county operations is the upper tier of the pyramid.
for the one time costs basically those are related to the professional services.
we contract for legal as well as independent quality assurance and we bring the experts in only when we need them.
those are specific expertise that we don't necessarily have internally.
we bring the experts in only as we need them.
it also is training related costs and a 10 percent budgeted sceang, which is -- contingency, which is considered prudent for a project of this size.
the caveat that I spoke of in the previous slide deals with the ongoing costs associated with additional staff.
and this is the area of all areas that we've identified to you that needs a little further refinement.
the vendors will provide us with numbers and types of resources and based on their information we've estimated that conservatively the number of additional staff needed will be 10 or less.
and we'll be refining that number during implementation because there are some things we don't know.
and we'll only know as we flesh out during implementation.
some of that will be how we're going to structure the ongoing support, whether it will be more of a centralized or decentralized framework.
and what additional functions will be implemented.
our guiding principle, however, is we're going to retrain and redeploy as many of the existing staff as possible.
so the next step will present some definitions that will be helpful as we go on and discuss specific costs.
in negotiating the contract we structured it in a way that we fixed the price for those things we absolutely knew and we gave ourselves the flexibility to exercise through contract options items that we may have some decision making yet to do and that need some further refinement.
so the base system, which is the erp software, that's the core financial procurement, payroll and hr.
that would be things like our general ledger, our accounts payable, contracts, purchasing, those all have been fixed.
those prices are known.
we know we're going to do that.
those prices are fixed.
the base system support function are those items that we know we need to implement with the base system and those are things like check printing, document management and imaging and bar code scanning.
but we may have some options about what we implement because we already have a document management imaging system, we may choose to either expand that or we may choose to go with the vendor solution.
for that reason we've structured those items as contract options.
we have fully priced them and they will be in the budget numbers that you see, but we have the ability to control the execution of those.
the same thing with the additional or non-base items. Those again are similar to the base system support.
they have key functionality, but they're not critical to implement at the same time as the base system.
those will be things like fleet management, budget in terp of the tool sets and analyticals, treasury, inventory management, governance and risk compliance software, which is a specialty software that allows us to maintain segregation of duties, and cost accounting.
>> it's very likely that we will implement most if not all of those pieces too, but they're separated because we can implement them today's the end of the project.
we have prices to implement all of these that are included in the prices that we're going to talk about in a minute.
>> I知 going to turn it over to christina.
>> going over from the individual person to the numbers person, although the real numbers person sits right here.
I致e got my backup to the right of me here.
what we're seeing are the three layers of the pyramid, the supporting platform and the cost for it.
these are one time costs.
let me be clear.
there are also some ongoing to we're going to have on a separate slide.
this is the total picture.
the leftmost column here--
>> can you turn the microphone towards you?
>> can you hear me?
if we look at the supporting platform like donna said that's really the servers that the application is going to run on and operating system and so forth.
but there's also another component here, the infrastructure and the data center is part of this one time cost.
we had as an assumption early on that the project wasn't going to have to worry about the data center component, but we have included the one time cost needed for the data center in our total project cost.
so we have the system hardware and software, which is buying the servers themselves.
we have the maintenance and we have the column there for breaking out the data center and the infrastructure costs.
then in the center column is the second slice of the pier mid, which is the -- peer mid pyramid is the software itself.
the major component there is the 10% contingency, but we also have some quality assurance components by independent outside vendors that's worked very well during the r.f.p.
process.
we aren't always the experts of everything, so it works very well to bring in the experts to help us plan and do things correctly from the start and get things set up.
so there's some money in there as well for that.
so in summary, the total cost to implement everything, the one-time cost including the contingency and the data center is slightly less than $26.8 million.
and that covers the four years.
another way to slice these numbers is to look at them by funding source over the four-year project time.
again, this is the -- these are the one-time costs.
so if we look on the green row, those are the additional co funding needed.
as you can see there's nothing for fy 11.
there was co funding issued in fy 10 for fy 11 to there's no additional funding needed there for this coming year.
but in total the need is 16-point -- slightly more than $16.7 million in co funding.
from the general fund the blue row again, there's nothing really needed for fy 11, but in total over the four-year $1.5 million in general fund funding.
did I forget something important?
no?
all right.
moving right along.
so now we're moving over to the ongoing costs.
and in the spirit of no surprises, we are taking these out to the full 10-year term that we talked about when we were here in court 18 months ago.
and the big components here again are the supporting platform has some components.
it's hardware and software maintenance for the servers and operating system and so forth.
and there's also a center column, the data center lease space, and there's a separate item talking about the data center.
this is the one cost for fy '11, the 170,000 that the project -- existing budget could not absorb for fy 11.
so there's a separate action for that as part of the action items. We've also planned for equipment replacement because like donna said, every five years on the server side, we usually replace our equipment.
so that takes care of the supporting platform, the three columns that are there.
and we're again carrying them out for 10 years.
we keep on calling it the rp, we might as well call it the sap now.
the sap ongoing maintenance for sap, for the base system we have the 10-year costs and that's been locked in for the first six years through fy went to 16.
and after that it's locked to the -- either the consumer price index or less, so we put in an escalation of three percent here.
and then additional functions and ongoing maintenance for those.
so in total over 10 years we're talking about slightly under seven million in ongoing costs.
as you can see it varies from year to year, but on average it's right under $700,000 per year.
and we have some years where it is more -- substantially more and that's the year when we plan to replace the equipment.
again, the one ongoing cost that's in here is to support personnel, if any, the 10 or less, that is not part of these costs, right?
>> one thing as a reminder, back when we brought the r.f.p.
to y'all, we indicated that we would be getting costs for 10 years because the minimal plan was to keep a new system if we bought one for at least tep years.
so that was sort of the idea behind giving you the 10-year costs, both the one time and the ongoing.
obviously we would -- that's the minimal time we would want to keep this.
our idea would be more like 15 or 20 years.
fanned you think about it that way, you're still looking at these ongoing costs, $700,000.
they probably will pick up a little bit after 10 years, but still close to that.
and it makes your investment of those one-time monies we talked about spread out.
the longer we keep the system the more value we're going to get for that initial one time investment.
>> so in summary on the costs, the one-time -- the 27 million -- are right in line with what we've said all along.
we've talked about this for the past three years and we've always talked about these one time up front costs between 25 and 30 million.
and then we have the ongoing costs slightly less than the seven million dollars.
did I say something wrong?
no?
fft all right.
so those are the answers to what this is going to cost, as much as we know today, which is pretty much all of it except for the support model afterwards.
we're now going to move on to talk about why is it that we need this new system and what are we going to get for the money.
we love this slide.
I know --
>> [ laughter ] it's hard to see and it's not meant for you guys to read.
it's not an eye chart, a vision test here.
it's just -- it's the slide that I think really represents with one picture why we need a new system.
and some of you might remember this slide and we sometimes like to blow it up to some enormous size so you could read it, but anyhow, what -- this is the world we live in today and the yellow circles represent the components of functions that hte provides us today.
and when I came here 10-plus years ago, pretty much we had those yellow circles and not much else, right?
but the county was going through a change at that time and technology was going through a change.
this was right as the internet was starting to become more popular, so the demands from the outside started increasing during my time here.
we needed more and different functionality and sometimes those external forces could be -- it can be vendors, it can be regulations and whatever that we needed to change.
so we started to -- well, we added on to rt and we added on some more, and the open enrollment system is one example where there was really an example and ht couldn't deliver that functionality to us so we kept on adding our own.
so what we ended up with is a very fragmented world that we live in today.
and that comes with some negatives to it, right?
you can clearly keep on band-aiding and adding to what we're doing today, but you do expose yourself.
clearly we have data in many different places, so making sure it's secure becomes more and more of a problem.
to do any reporting or analysis becomes an issue because you don't know what the truth -- where does the data reside that is the one that I really want to rely on to make my analysis and my reporting.
so early on we talked about whether do we want to go -- you could go to an approach where you could go off and buy individual pieces or we decided as a county and all the different business owners, pbo, hrmd, auditors, purchasing, that we really want add more integrated approach and look for a system and buy all those components as one.
so another thing that was a reason that we talked about 18 months ago is that with this old technology, we're finding it increasingly hard to find skills to maintain and support this system.
and I was kidding then that you're probably looking at the youngest person in the county who would know how to support it.
and unfortunately that's still the case, right?
we haven't been able to hire any -- any new people to help out and maintain the ht system.
all right.
so where do we want to go?
we want to go to a more integrated picture of the world.
and have integrated data where all these different modules are going to use the same source of data.
and also some of the critical functionality that made us add all these systems are sometimes like for hr functionality, we don't even have the functions today.
we're actually going to get an hr system as part of this new system.
then what we did, so how do we make sure that we get that in tomorrow's environment?
the answer is we had a very rigorous r.f.p.
with all these requirements that are going to be covered by the new system.
and as robin likes to point out, it's not the how we're going to implement things that are in the r.f.p., it's the what.
the how is what we decide during the implementation process, where we define how we want our business processes to work in this new system.
so it's an integrated system and we also -- we're going to a windows server based system with all the modern tools, so to find staff to maintain and support is going to be not an issue anymore.
and then we are getting a modern -- if you've been on that green screen hte knows what that looks like and what the plimented capabilities are of that.
we're now going to get e-business capabilities.
it's going to be web-based.
we're going to get work flows for automatic approvals.
we can get rid of some of the paper-based systems we have.
and we're going to give the vendors and employees -- the employees already have self service to some extent today because we went and did one of those add-ons again, right?
but there will now, a vendor self service too where they can go online and see the statute tus of their invoices.
we'll still leave the phone as an option, but some vendors really want a more automated way and not relying on that somebody is picking up the phone on the other end.
so all of those are going to be capabilities in the new system, including the ability to do better reporting and analysis.
I can't make somebody use those new tools, but we are going to have the ability to provide people better information so that we can have better decision -- instead of being reactive mode, we actually have an opportunity to maybe do -- make some better plan decisions instead of being surprised that overtime costs are where they are, maybe we can see it coming before we end up there.
that's the goal.
and in the spirit of full disclosure, mike made us add the little green box at the bottom.
>> [ laughter ] it's not like we took everything on that first slide.
there's still going to be some external systems. We're not becoming the end all, be all system for Travis County.
clearly we will still have court systems. We will still have if health and human services system.
there are still banks out there.
so all the external interfaces that we had before are still going to be there in this new system too.
it not like we're becoming the center of everything with the befit project.
so there anything else?
no?
so in summary, what is it that we're getting?
well, we're getting the supporting platform.
and the reason the costs are what they are is that we can't reuse anything of what we have today.
the system, the service that we run the ht system are not going to be supporting what we need.
so we need to replace all those servers.
so that's part of what we get.
and then we have built in the replacement and maintenance of those.
and then we need the infrastructure certain pieces of it.
we need some new network and some new security components.
so that's what we get with the supporting platform.
and then for the software component itself, the sap, the one-time and ongoing, the implementation services together with the software is really what we like to look at us buying the software.
here I知 going to using a mike analogy that we wouldn't just buy a bunch of lumber and equipment and not -- to build a building, all the supplies, but not have somebody actually build the building.
so that's what the implementer does for us is actually makes the software whole and make it usable to Travis County.
what we learned when we visited with these other government customers is that they told us that the key to your success is to selecting a good implementer.
the implementation services is what brings it all together and makes the software usable to you.
because it is a complex piece of software.
it is all integrated and you need somebody with specific expertise to make that so.
having said that, it is most definitely a joint work effort for -- between Travis County and lsi.
it's not like lsi can succeed on their own.
so we have some responsibilities too.
we have talked about the contract and all these great things and the contract termdz and the 1400 page contract, but in the end if we're not fulfilling our responsibility, then we're not going to succeed.
we need to make sure that we stay on task too.
it's truly a joint effort.
and those of you who have been here for all three years have heard me being on my soapbox many times about how I don't want us to look at these projects as i.t.
projects because that's why they fail.
it's a business project.
first and foremost a business project.
there are some i.t.
components that support it underneath, but what's going to make it succeed is that we have all the business owners and people in the county buying in and being engaged and making good decisions for how their processes should work.
so we're getting business expertise from lsi and one together with us, we know what Travis County requirements are and they know the software and what it takes to make it do what we want it to do.
so under business expertise, there is business blueprinting, and what that means is that we're going to sit down.
again, we defined the what we want to do, but not the how.
that's when we flesh out and see how this software meets -- how we make it do what we want it to do.
if there are any gaps, how we address those.
work flows we've talked about.
the electronic approvals and so forth.
and then the organizational readiness and change management, that's a key component.
and I know susan heard that when she's talked to others too that change management is another one of those big key to your success, getting the organization ready for the change, getting them trained and accepting of the new system.
and donna athletes goetz to lead it from our end, but there is a counterpart on lsi with a great deal of experience and they together are then going to come up with the plans and make sure that we're ready to accept a new system.
under business expertise, and it might seem a little weird, but to me the key to success here again is that the business owners have defined what this is that they want to convert and not so much the technical aspect of it.
it's usually where it fails is agreeing on what needs to be converted.
we have all -- had all that in the r.f.p.
and it's been signed off on by all the business owners exactly what's going to be converted.
so hopefully that will be a smoother process than in the past.
finally the r.f.p.
maintenance software have been capped, so that's also part of what we're getting.
we're going to shift and talk a little bit about the schedule.
again, in the spirit of no surprises, this is the same schedule.
I know this is very high level.
that we present when had we issued r.f.p.
we're still -- the plan is still to go live April 2012 with the financials and procurements piece.
the base system.
and then the payroll and hr piece January 1st, 2013.
and together with that we have the base systems support functions.
now, in the contract we have a detailed -- somewhere in between.
it's definitely more detailed than this.
it's 40 pages, but it not finalized.
it's to be refined with lsi when they come on site during the preplanning and the -- we'll set the final very detailed project scaled down to a much lower level than what's in the project today.
it's in the milestone deliverable level today in the contract.
all right.
I知 going to hand it back to donna.
actually, that was the visual slides --
>> the last couple of slides really deal with more in terms of the implementers contract.
some of the things we built in that we really want to reinforce with the court.
we did negotiate a very performance driven payment schedule in this contract.
we have payments tied to specific work products, and that really -- what that is is lsi's term for deliverables.
there are 83 of those in their implementtation contract.
what you see to the right is an example of the deliver rabbles or work products tied to conversion.
there are conversion plans, cutover plans and finalized plans.
and what each one of these work products does is it tells us what is in the deliverable with some detail, and it tells us who is responsible for the development of the deliverables.
so where you see the r under the lsi column, that means they're responsible for the development of that.
where you see the a under the Travis County column, that means we're responsible for reviewing it and accepting it.
so it is as christina said very much a joint effort, but we do have concrete deliverables and our payments are tied to these kind of deliverables.
with respect to the conversion one, we have this not only for the financials and procurement phase, but we also have the same deliverables for the payroll hr phase.
and as christina instead with respect to conversion because that was one of those areas we heard a lot of concern about, in this particular case we are responsible for making sure the data is clean and ready to go.
lsi is going to be responsible for telling us what format it has to be in to be accepted by the new system.
and we bring those together and we push that data into the new system.
and again, one of the success factors that was done prior to my coming was they talked to people to specifically identify what was going to be converted and got the buyoff ahead of time so that there aren't any surprises.
>> the next slide, one of the other things we negotiated that we talked about is a retainage withhold of 10 percent.
and one of the phrases we heard that we liked was skin in the game.
we wanted to make sure the vendor was going to be with us through the implementation and post-implementation and we wanted a monetary incentive to make sure that happened.
so that's what this retainage withhold does.
it keeps the skin in the game.
we tied that to specific acceptance criteria in the contract.
we have a total of 35 acceptance criteria before retainage is released.
and the financial procurement phase we have 12.
in the hr payroll area we have 11.
and we have 10 final acceptance criteria.
what you see on the slide are examples, partial list, not complete list, in various areas of what we mean by acceptance criteria.
so for example, in accounts payable, we have to be able to cut accurate vendor checks.
same thing with our own payroll.
we have be have to be able to cut accurate payroll checks.
so there are very, very specific criteria to make sure that the system is working before we pay out that retainage.
what you don't see on here is we also have some systems related, acceptance criteria, for example, application run times, down times or up times, and response times.
so they're not in here, but again, we have a comprehensive list of those.
>> so the last slice of the pyramid again, what are we getting with county operations?
we've talked about contingency, we've talked about what those other costs are in terms of training related expenditures and the professional services.
and again, the ongoing costs, we've talked about the staffing and how that will be further refined, but we have come up with a conservative estimate of 10 or less.
so we've talked a little bit about what are our responsibilities for success?
it's really great that we lock the implementer and others into very specific requirements, but with that comes responsibilities of our own to make it successful.
and there was a lot of research done and lessons learned and communicated to us and so we've listed some of those items here as things that we've learned.
for example, county focus.
we need to designate it as a priority project and have the leadership for it.
timely decisions.
and that is at all levels.
we have process participants, we have business unit owners, we have policy mayors.
so at all levels we're going to need timely decision making.
adherence to accepted plans and schedules.
if we say we only have five days to review a deliverable, then that's what we need to take is five days.
and we need to avoid scope creep.
they did a lot of that by doing some of the preventive work and going out and getting people to sign off on the requirements before the r.f.p.
was issued, but there's always something new that comes up that looks like it would be really great, to we need discipline associated with that.
near and dear to my heart is the willingness to change.
again, that was a big lesson learned.
we talked to several people who did not do this very well and they actually started back down the same path and reworked from customization back to more of a let's relook at our processes.
and again as we've said, the r.f.p.
talks about the 7,000 plus requirements and what are we getting, not how are we doing it.
so that's where the willingness to change comes in.
the cross-organizational involvement in communication.
up to this point we've had a lot of of gauge.
and peamtion and we thank all the county staff and departments who participated in the evaluation process.
it truly was a big effort and it's greatly appreciated.
but we need that ongoing.
it doesn't stop just with the evaluation.
it now begins with implementation.
and we need to weigh communication.
we -- we have committed to doing outward communication, but we also need to hear back from our business partners in this process.
and we want to make sure they understand don't assume we know it or someone who has told it to us.
we really need to tha key feedback thord to be successful.
the bottom line is our inability to meet our responsibility is going to negatively affect our cost, quality, scope of services and schedule.
and with that comes additional costs and the contingency may be eaten away if we don't meet our contractual responsibilities.
so those were just some of the things that were communicated to us and that we learned along the line.
the requested actions today are grouped into three big buckets if you will, based on the presentation we're asking for the Commissioners to give us a vote of confidence, recognizing the befit project is a priority and affirming your desire to fund the one time and ongoing costs as presented.
and then there are several fy 11 actions that are out there that are part of not only this agenda item, but several other agenda items. And then affirming the desire that if you choose to fund this program, that there will be ongoing costs that will need to go into future target budgets.
with that I guess we would say are there any questions?
>> I have a few.
and I知 quite sure everybody has probably got questions.
this is really I think a great effort in toward some type of stability that we haven't experienced in the past I guess as far as getting away from the old hte system, which has kind of been lifting some eye brows as far as the challenges that we've had with that old financial system that you have some place.
but with that have you presented a lot of information to us and I guess some of the questions I would want to make sure that we have in place, and I think you have basically laid out some of them, but my -- a question that I haven't heard answered is for an answer to this particular question, some of the safeguards as far as retention of -- let me get an example.
hte has a lot of data that you rely upon.
and of course, going to a new system, of course we -- you will go through converging process, but my concern is the archive or the history of data that we'll probably need in the future.
how will we have a retension for some of the data that may be sitting there, and of course you will need to refer to that data?
what would be the retention period for that data as we even build up new type of transactions, especially with the implementer and also the software vendor in this process?
so the question is retention of archived records that exist in the old -- under the hte system, how would that be done?
how will we get there?
>> that's a good question, Commissioner.
and one of the decisions that we made, as christina said, we looked at the business need for retention, and it's a slightly different leng of time for data, but I think an average it's about a year's data that we will convert under the new system.
the rest we will retain on the I series, which is h test e.
so we won't be doing business on it, but all of our old data will be retained on that system because the cost of converting all that is too expensive.
and we aren't going to be getting it.
and later down the line there may be some less expensive ways.
that's a pretty inexpensive way to keep it, but there may be some other ways that we take it off ht and put it on something else.
but we're primarily going to convert about a year's data.
and our people spent a lot of time cleaning up the data to make sure it's right.
as we were doing needs analysis and stuff.
so we're in pretty good shape in terms of the data we want to convert.
that's a big issue.
a lot of systems fail, either the data is not clean or people forgot what it costs to convert.
so I think as well as we can, we're on top of that.
>> okay.
second, the quality control mechanism that you have in place, will have in place, how will that actually occur?
you have quality control in arenas that mean different things to different folks, but as far as the quality control aspect of looking at this particular system, how would independence be orchestrated or adhered to whereby we make sure that that particular individual, whoever it is, the firm, whoever you're using, is actually as independent as they should be to make sure what gets on the back end of this thing is not biased.
>> okay.
christina can answer that.
>> the quality piece, now today we don't have all these different environments set out to make sure that we're not interfering with each other the way we will have in the new system.
in the new system there will be both development systems, there will be systems for training and systems for testing, things that we don't have today.
so that the developers are living sort of in the world of their own and they might do some smaller so-called type unit testing and then there's a controlled controlcontrolled for how that gets moved over from testing.
again, we're talking about ant integrated system so that all the pieces are tested as an integrated system before they're allowed and that they pass through control checkpoints before they're allowed to pass on to the production environment.
>> to the production end.
>> so we have several steps before something.
it doesn't -- nobody is going to be allowed to set the programs straight or make configuration changes straight into the production system.
that is not going to happen.
that's priced out.
that's part of the total cost that's already included, and sap also comes with a software that helps you manage that.
and the approvals, they call it solutions manager.
but anyhow...
>> that's good to hear because I think that may have been a piece that's been been miss -- very vital component that hasn't been there in the past.
hopefully it will come to pass.
>> oh, it's part of the architecture that's being proposed in the system environment that's been proposed.
it is definitely going to be there.
another thing to bring up here is that we are also -- I talked about it quickly when I talked about the top part of the triangle when I talked about the quality assurance pieces.
we're bringing in an outside vendor to make sure we set up all the technology correctly, all the policies that are related to new patches as they come in that things have been set up and established correctly up front so that we do it in a planned way, preventive instead of realing it down the road that -- realizing it down the road that we had some concern with how our environments are set up.
so we're doing it that way as well to make sure that we have a quality product and that we catch things early instead of late.
>> okay.
how would we be reassured to put into a comfort level whereby the experiences that this court has have -- is currently having that the persons -- the vendor, the implementer, the implementer in this particular case and also the software vendor, even though it may be oracle type of setting, will be around to ensure that as we go into the future with the platform and also the software that's involved in this particular situation, those particular settings are embraced in future endeavors and also implemented.
I知 kind of concerned about that.
I don't want nobody to fly away from us when we need them the most.
how can we be assured that those folks will be here for us in the future as we go through this process?
>> we did an analysis of going concern on the financial statements of all of the people, all of the vendors that we evaluated to check their financial statements and you never know when something really horrible happens.
but we did -- we did analyze the financial statements to make sure that they were in fact going concerns.
sap of course is one of the largest so far wear vendors in the country.
lsi is obviously a very fine I want plerrer because they're the -- implementer because they survived all our rigorous evaluation.
one of the things we really liked about lsi is that many of the people on their teams had worked in government and put out the document so they weren't just contractors.
they had put together -- they had gotten out payrolls and had a feeling for what it like to be us rather than be on the contracting side.
so that was part of the rigorous evaluation and I think that we've picked a really good team and we had good people working on it.
>> another thing I wanted to add is I wanted to double-check is that the source code for sap is in escrow too.
so that kind of goes to your question if they went out of business, we -- the source code is in escrow, so wekdz get access to it at that point.
>> that's very important because that very important to ensure that we have something that we can latch on to to make sure that we have got source code, then that's a big, big, big component if somebody just happened to fly away on such a big, expensive endeavor.
we have source code access --
>> [overlapping speakers]
>> if they fly away, then we have it.
>> yes.
>> I知 sorry.
>> we have final comment.
I think there's some experience with this where this is their main product.
some other vendors we have dealt with and we're seeing this with our current vendors that this is not their strategic product anymore, but this is absolutely sap's strategy project that we've been purchase willing for them.
it's not some add on product.
it is the strategic product for them.
so then you also have the focus on the product.
>> final question.
in the experience that we have in the past dealing with systems that we've dealt with as far as purchasing system or getting things online here with Travis County, we have seen an emergence of having to have deacial f.t.e.'s to deal -- additional f.t.e.'s to deal with so-called infer face so-calledtr face with the system and what we're getting it for as far as the outcome is concerned.
my question is the -- I heard that in the ongoing and the one time expense, the ongoing expenses and things of that nature.
there could have been 10 possible f.t.e.'s over the duration of a period of time.
I think it was 10 years.
but my concern, though, is the particular f.t.e.'s that are proud bureaucrat on board for this particular en-- that are brought on board for this particular endeavor, where would they be located?
I think it's very critical in my mind that befit, if you're going to be the system that we need to deal with, it just appears to me that the persons that we end up dealing with as far as f.t.e.'s, should be under your shop.
now, that's -- that's just me talking.
I don't know exactly where you're going to go, but in my mind you need to have hands on personnel that we can rely upon for accountability and also for accessibility.
so I知 concerned about that if f.t.e.'s are coming on board under befit, in this transition and going to a new system, in my opinion it should be up under befit.
so that's just my interpretation.
you don't have to answer that, but as far as the way I知 looking at things as far as f.t.e.'s in the future.
>> I had a question about when do we think we will know the number of additional f.t.e.'s needed, a.
and b would be what funding or budget cycle do we think may be impacted?
>> what we don't know, judge, is it is possible that what we have now is just fine.
it's possible.
we just don't know because our people haven't worked with the system.
and one of the things about these big systems is that they do a lot and there's a lot of stuff in there that you need to load that up, you need learn how to use it, and in our office right now, for instance, we have a lot of programmers because we did the programming for hte because we own the source code.
well, we won't be doing that anymore.
we don't have the source code.
so what we will have is more budget analysts or business analysts who know, for instance, accounts payable and know the system.
and so until we see how that kind of lays out, we're not going to have a feel for that.
when we started this we asked for what we thought we needed.
but we just don't -- I don't want to come here and tell you we are never going to need any more people because I知 not sure that is --
>> can we say for sure or not 2011, fiscal year?
>> that's for sure.
>> in fact, judge, it should go kind of along with that high level schedule we had out there.
you know, so we would know -- we're targeting being done with the implementation for phase 1, which is the proceed ciewrmt and the -- the procurement and the financials April of 2012.
so for that piece we should know before then if we need additional resources to support that before then.
the same with the bringing on the hr payroll part in January of 2013.
I couldn't remember the slide.
I知 going it off the top of my head.
and there are also those additional functions like budget preparation, fleet are two of the really big ones that would be scheduled more in fy 2014 and that's where we do have a little more -- particularly the grc one, if we were to implement that, that's a relatively complicated piece of software that we didn't think about having resources for before we started this project.
so -- but like we would -- as we go through each of those phases we will have identified if there are any additional staffing need.
and susan is right.
we know that we would not need more than 10 county wide, but we just can't say right now today that it will be zero.
we would like it to be two just as I知 sure you would.
>> but that was a 10-year time frame, if I heard that correctly.
is that right?
we're not talking right now, we're saying within a 10-year spread from today's date, you may need up to 10 employees, but -- up to 10.
in other words, less than that probably.
but that was within a 10 year time frame, 10 year block.
>> I thought what the judge was asking is when would we know when we would actually -- when would we have an idea of when we would need those resources?
when would we have identified when we would need those resources and that was what I was trying to answer?
did that answer your question?
>> yes, sir.
>> anything else Commissioner Davis?
>> no, that was my last question, judge.
thank you.
>> Commissioner Huber.
>> first of all my compliments to the team.
I知 impressed with the thorough analysis and the presentation.
one question I have that I壇 like to ask is on page 19 when you speak to county's responsibility for success.
I noticed that the red at the bottom, the county's inability to meet its responsibilities will negatively affect cost schedule, quality and/or scope of work.
the only plains in the whole presentation where the text is outlined in red.
>> [ laughter ] so -- pardon?
>> the negative.
if we don't do this, it's going cost more.
>> exactly.
but my question is because historically we run into time delays and we run into resistance to change and things like that.
has the team put any thought or planning into how to monitor how we're tracking from the county's responsibility standpoint so we don't get too deep in the hole wf we recognize a problem?
like resistance to change or something?
>> we're going to have to -- one of the things about the financial system and in terms of our laying out the schedule is there are just times that our department has time to work on it and they don't.
just like payroll, it needs to come up at the beginning of the year and it needs to work when we bring it out.
so internally in the auditor's office, our people are really used to making time deadlines.
we're going to have to do that, but it's going to be more than just our department.
I mean, you're right.
and if we don't meet these, then we let the vendor down and what we've got in the contract is they're putting a certain amount of people on this.
and if we get behind, then they have to get behind and put more people on it and there's an hourly rate we have to pay for.
so it will cost more.
there will be some of that.
no one is perfect, but there is an incentive for us to focus.
I will say this on this process, we're only one week late.
we thought we would come in the late week in November.
we're trying to hold very tightly to the time schedule.
but you're absolutely right.
we need to keep on schedule and everyone needs to meet their obligation.
and it's -- it won't be just people in the auditor's office.
it will be -- and we will have to come and make some policy changes or ask you to make policy changes.
and we need to lay those out for you and you need to be able to decide and move along too.
so we'll have -- you will be involved as well.
and three of the business partners who are here that I did not introduce who will be part of that is the treasurer, dolores ortega carter, rodney roads in for pbo and diana blank enship for hmrd.
and they are integral partners in this.
>> they need no introduction.
>> they don't, but in case someone doesn't know them.
so we're all going to have to do our part.
>> and to answer your question about how we're going to manage this, that's part of my responsibility.
that's the county's side of project management.
and that I have an escalation path to go to.
when I see that things are not going right, I need to -- we have the executive committee and of course susan is the sponsor that I would go to first and say we're not where we need to be.
we're not staying on track with the schedule and the commitments that we have signed up for.
so -- and again it goes back to us having a very open communication.
again, everybody -- it's better to get the information earlier, right, than be able to do something with it.
that's sort of my responsibility on this project.
if I知 not managing that, then I知 failing at my job.
>> in 13-a the group asks us to take two action.
one is to approve the contract with lab rinth solutions, d/b/a ls aivment consultant and sap services inc.
do we need to hear anything else on this item before we take action?
>> I think we need to approve both.
>> move approval.
>> okay.
and we have representatives here.
>> yes.
>> who is here from sap or had y'all planned to do that?
>> there's a person here from sap and a person here from lsi.
>> we need to do a budget transfer first.
>> before you do that we need the budget transfer approved.
>> [one moment, please, for change in captioners]
>> good afternoon.
>> how are y'all doing?
>> great.
>> any comments?
>> bruce bellmore with lsi.
I wanted to thank the county for an incredible opportunity to be here.
I wanted to just communicate my experience over the past 18 or so months in working with the team that I致e been in this business for my entire professional career pretty much for the last 20 years now and I have never seen the level, planning, you know, analysis that we've gone through over the last 18 months with this team and with the evaluation.
I think that speaks very well to the county, certainly with the team, both individually and collectively with the team and we're looking forward to moving forward with what will certainly be a very successful project.
>>
>> [inaudible] what was discussed earlier when I asked the question are you all going to be around?
>> [laughter] I知 concerned about that but they he reassured me with some of the things the staff brought up, but my main concern with your record that you've been around a while, you are not going to fly away.
>> from the company's standpoint one of the things that differentiates our firm is we helped sap develop the solution.
we've never been overtime or over budget in our 12-year history.
some of our earliest clients, we were spun out of the implementation team at massachusetts institute of technology.
they are still a customer today for us.
so we see our customers and the people who we work with in these projects as friends by the time that we come out of these projects and we continue to move forward and keep in touch with them even if they are not contracting us for services longer term.
and some of them do.
so -- and that's worked from a cultural model, that's worked well for us over the last 12 years that we've been in business.
>> thank you.
>> thank you.
>> any other comments?
>> yeah, I知 tom dunaway, account executive for sap and I too am grateful to the team for all their hard work and also bruce and his company and we're very excited about the opportunity to earn your business.
>> thank you.
we look forward to working with you.
all in favor?
that passes by unanimous vote.
did we call up number 11?
Commissioner Davis voting no number 12, on 7 and 9 we see the figure $26,779,363.
if, is that the one time amount?
>> yes, it is, judge.
>> Commissioner Davis moves approval.
Commissioner Gomez seconds.
discuss?
all in favor?
that passes by unanimous vote.
on project ongoing budget, that includes an amount for the data center which is in c which we need to take into executive session.
seems to me that we need to do b, which is the amount, and the question is do we want to do b before we go into executive session or afterwards?
either way is fine with me.
>> do it now.
>> then let's approve b right now.
b is on page 10 and that amount set forth is $6,887,685 over a 10-year period.
>> move approval.
>> second.
>> Commissioner Davis and a enthusiast Commissioner Davis moves approval.
and any discussion on that motion?
all in favor?
that passes by unanimous vote.
we'll take c into executive session under consultation with attorney and the security exceptions to the open meetings act.
and if we take 10, I think we're ready for executive session now.
so 13 c we'll take into executive session that we just announced.
The Closed Caption log for this Commissioners Court agenda item is provided by Travis County Internet Services. Since this file is derived from the Closed Captions created during live cablecasts, there are occasional spelling and grammatical errors. This Closed Caption log is not an official record the Commissioners Court Meeting and cannot be relied on for official purposes. For official records please contact the County Clerk at (512) 854-4722.
Last Modified:
Wednesday, December 8, 2010 8:46 AM
