Client Success

LA County, CA Department of Public Works – Why CGI and AMS Advantage?

In 1999, Los Angeles County, CA Department of Public Works implemented KPMG’s Performance Series, the client server version of the mainframe FAMIS solution. When Performance Series changed hands from KPMG to Tier, the Department kept pace with change through customization – customizing Performance Series as needed to serve their business needs. However, they soon realized, Performance Series was not exactly the state-of-the-art solution they needed long term. By 2004, LADPW dropped support.

At the same time, Los Angeles County, CA, an AMS Advantage® client since 1989, was exploring an upgrade to the web-based release. Their goal was to modernize and establish an enterprise foundation for finance, procurement, budgeting, HR and payroll, to bring the departments’ business processes and information together into a single solution. While the Department was considering joining the enterprise, they also wanted to understand their options. A competitive procurement, conducted by the County, ultimately led to their partnership with CGI. They went live with the web-based AMS Advantage Financial Management solution in 2008.

Mark Blank, Project Manager for the Department recently joined us to talk about their challenges, the change and the benefits they are seeing today with AMS Advantage Financial Management.

What about the legacy Performance Series, or FAMIS solution, led the Department to choose AMS Advantage?
Performance Series had great features, but it was dying on the vine. With no upgrades, no new features or functionality, we had to rely on ourselves to keep pace with change. That meant maintaining a specialized IT staff to customize Performance Series to keep pace with change and maintain those customizations, as well as the interfaces with the County system.

Like the Performance Series solution, AMS Advantage was built specifically for government. The difference is CGI’s long-term commitment to AMS Advantage. They are in it for the long haul, and their expert team is focused solely on new features and functionality driven by government needs, as well as government specific regulatory and legislative changes.

What did you discover during the competitive procurement?
Prior to upgrading, the County went through the competitive procurement process to learn more about the enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions out there. I was surprised to learn that there are no other systems available on the market today that are built exclusively for government.

What does that mean to the Department? At the core – fund accounting. No product I evaluated made sense to me from a government perspective. How they were dealing with the concept of fund accounting was either a non-entity, or a band-aid to a commercial accounting system. It was clear the amount of work required to customize a system like that to meet our needs, and the long-term work necessary to maintain it would be huge. It would almost have put us back to where we were with our legacy Performance Series system.

Once we saw AMS Advantage, for me it was like an epiphany.

What did you see with AMS Advantage?
True fund accounting is at the core of AMS Advantage – supporting the way government does business out-of-the-box. It gave us the foundation and familiarity the Department was looking for. While the majority of our needs are labor-related, and therefore, required a specialized level of detail to manage effectively, we were able to rely on configuration and best practice customization to achieve our goals.

For example, adding a Drawdown Group to Program allows us to bill in multiple fashions. Originally designed to group Programs for billing, we now use it to segregate billings for Programs within a Major Program. Today, this change is part of the AMS Advantage baseline and maintained by CGI, as opposed to a specialized IT staff – and the functionality is available to the rest of the County, as well as to the AMS Advantage client community as baseline functionality.

Working closely with CGI, we also developed cost accounting functionality for our Internal Service Fund, which provides a more specialized level of cost and project accounting and billing detail. The upside to working with CGI as a developer meant we were able to control development costs, minimize impact to other system components, and secure the specialized functionality we required.

What benefits have you achieved with AMS Advantage?
Any change can be challenging – especially a project as large as this one. After all, the County was bringing together 38 departments and the Department was retiring its legacy accounting system. CGI brings more to the table than the only built for government enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. They bring more than 35 years of government experience, AMS Advantage solution expertise, and a proven methodology for managing their projects.

Partnering with CGI to implement AMS Advantage has helped us achieve a number of critical goals, including:

• A modern system that will take our business well into the future.
• A centralized system that eliminated redundant data entry, inconsistent processes, and system reconciliations.
• Refocused our IT group responsibilities from development and customization and interface maintenance to business intelligence and reporting.

What would you say to someone with FAMIS just starting out looking at new ERP solutions?
With CGI, the focus was on understanding our business, and using AMS Advantage to make improvements – not about making the software work for government.

There is no other system out there built for government, and you have to decide if you are willing to sacrifice that critical element. We were not willing to sacrifice fund accounting. We chose built for government before with Performance Series, so it was the logical next step to demand the same with our new, modern system.

We were impressed with CGI’s track record. They came to the project with 35 years of government experience, product expertise and tremendous enthusiasm to get the job done right. Their project management was excellent, and in fact, many of the people on the team had their official Project Management certificate from the Project Management Institute. They brought process, clear and logical process, along with flexible plans and strategy documents to support and guide the project. In addition, that was something that was somewhat lacking on our original Performance Series implementation, where we had to figure it out on our own.

With CGI there is no finger pointing, because they implement their own solution. This means a single point of accountability for the project and long-term support, not an integrator who implements a number of solutions all at once. With CGI, no one is going to respond with “that is someone else’s problem.”

Too many IT projects go for the low bid, and they end up with two people in a garage trying to support a billion dollar organization without the depth and expertise that CGI brings to the table.

Finally, every project comes with challenge – they go hand in hand. Every stakeholder wants to be heard, and they want to be sure their needs will be met by the resulting system. We had top-level support, focused on change management and holding stakeholders accountable. In addition, we had an expert, collaborative partner in CGI.