Executive Update

Letter from Vice President, CGI's AMS Advantage Program

What a fantastic year! My first full year back with the AMS Advantage Program has been an incredible journey returning to my roots where I had an opportunity to listen to the AMS Advantage client community, industry analysts, and CGI’s AMS Advantage team members. The feedback obtained has helped to embolden the AMS Advantage Program and further expand our offerings.

Since our last newsletter, the AMS Advantage program has continued to make great efforts to achieve our goals: to grow and strengthen the program. Our persistent focus on key initiatives, enhancements to the product, and growth in the marketplace provide evidence of these efforts.

Key Initiatives

We continue to expand our service offerings to meet the evolving needs of our clients. Some of our recent key initiatives include:

• Managed Advantage, CGI’s managed service for AMS Advantage ERP, improves efficiencies, reduces costs, and reduces the risk and effort of staffing, upgrades, and ongoing operations. With CGI and our Managed Advantage solution, you have a single point of accountability for ERP software, services, hosting and application management. CGI continues to add to the Managed Advantage family with Wake County, North Carolina; the State of Wyoming; the State of Alaska; and Los Angeles County, California recently selecting the offering.
• Enterprise Intelligence360 expands our AMS infoAdvantage capabilities to enterprise-wide use. The broader Enterprise Intelligence360 toolset provides you with the ability to better target various levels of your organization with the appropriate business intelligence visualization, from high level dashboards through self service Explorer spaces. Access of critical enterprise-wide information enables you to move from production and operational reporting to analytics to enhance management of operations to drive reductions in spend and increase in revenue and mobility to allow authorized users access to information from mobile devices. Imagine enabling your government executives armed with an IPAD to access information across the enterprise to make decisions while in a critical budget meeting or while answering questions in a citizen facing event. Think of your casual users being able to access information through google like search capabilities available through Explorer to find the answers they need. You can empower more users with targeted, more timely, and easier access to enterprise wide information through CGI’s Enterprise Intelligence360 program.
• Automated Testing Services provides services to build, test, and deliver upgraded software including customizations and database conversions. This service increases the speed, efficiency, quality, and predictability of upgrades and provides opportunity savings so your staff can focus on other work. I have received a great amount of positive feedback on this offerings ability to deliver a high ROI. There is currently an effort taking place to rebrand this initiative to properly reflect all that this service has to offer.

Product Enhancements

We are pleased to announce that AMS Advantage 3.9 was successfully released on September 30, 2011. With each new release, enhancements add new AMS Advantage ERP functionality, making it more powerful, flexible and user-friendly. AMS Advantage 3.9 provides enhancements to increase business end-user and application process efficiency, supports methods to increase revenues and decrease costs, maintains government focus, provides better access to information, and improves performance and integration. This latest release of AMS Advantage also provides new or significantly revamped modules such as a new Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (CAFR) module, a Manager Self Service module, dramatic Vendor Self Service enhancements, and a completely enhanced Performance Management module.

We are also excited about the next release, Release 3.10, which includes Debt Management, Worker’s Compensation, Capital Budgeting, and Financial/HRM Executive Dashboard enhancements.

Market Growth

We are very excited to announce our AMS Advantage client community has continued to grow and diversify with the addition of new clients (Alaska) and clients taking advantage of additional offerings (Wake County and Wyoming).

CGI’s commitment to the Advantage client community is as strong as ever. This is evident from the success of CGI Forum 2011 Online. In May 2011, over 1,957 people from 63 client organizations attended CGI Forum 2011 Online, making it the most accessible AMS Advantage client community event to date.

I am pleased to announce the return of CGI Forum 2012 as an onsite event. The CGI Forum is the premier networking and educational event for the AMS Advantage community. This can’t-miss event will take place in October 2012. Please be on the lookout for a location and date announcement in early December.

As we continue to move forward, my team and I promise to continue our commitment to you and to growing the AMS Advantage program. We will implement this promise by establishing new relationships, promoting CGI awareness and our best-of-breed built-for-government AMS Advantage ERP solution throughout the marketplace and ultimately growing the AMS Advantage client community.

Thank you for your continued support,

Daniel Keene
CGI Vice President, AMS Advantage Program