Client Success

Wake County, North Carolina Achieves Efficiency with AMS Advantage ERP

With 4,000 employees and a $1 billion operating budget, Wake County, NC is one of only 22 counties in the nation with an AAA bond rating by all three major rating agencies. Following a comprehensive procurement, Wake County, North Carolina selected CGI and the AMS Advantage® ERP solution to replace their legacy FAMIS (Financial), ADPICS (Procurement), BPREP (Budgeting) and Genesys (HR and Payroll) systems.

Today the County is live with the full AMS Advantage ERP solution, including Financial Management, Procurement, Performance Budgeting, Human Resource Management, Payroll and AMS infoAdvantage for Business Intelligence.

Johnna Rogers, Deputy County Manager and Chief Financial Officer, recently joined us to talk about some of the County’s challenges and the benefits they have achieved with AMS Advantage ERP.

Why did the County replace FAMIS?
FAMIS had served us well, but was on mainframe technology that had outlived its useful life. Tier Technologies was unable to provide us a road map for FAMIS and we became concerned about the future of the product’s movement to currently technologies.

Also, over the past 20 years, the County had developed dozens of side system to provide for functionality not included in FAMIS or Genesys. We had so many different systems, so many different routines holding our system and our business processes together and knew this was not sustainable long-term. In the end, it came down to a handful of people who knew how to make it work. If anything happened to those people…well, the County was at risk.

When we considered replacing FAMIS, we also evaluated our other legacy systems, ADPICS, BPREP and Genesys. We knew it was time for something better.

Why CGI?
CGI has an unmatched track record of delivering AMS Advantage ERP for state and local governments. Their commitment to proven, modern technology and investing in functionality specific to government is unparalleled.

The people who work on their projects bring government experience, so we did not have to train them on how we work. Most importantly, they are experts of AMS Advantage ERP – they took what we had in mind and configured the solution to make it happen.

They know how to manage a successful project. In addition to a proven methodology, and reusable tools, they took time up front to teach us the “language” of the system so we could clearly communicate our needs. They begin with the end in mind – asking us what we wanted to achieve for the organization. They were highly collaborative, helping us figure out what we wanted, building it into a prototype environment and letting us “kick the tires.”

The fact that they implement their own software was also a big factor. With CGI, the buck stops with CGI – and from an implementation risk standpoint, that value should not be underestimated.

Why AMS Advantage ERP?
We short listed other firms, including SAP and Lawson, but their financial solutions struggled to easily handle basic government functionality like encumbrances or multi-year funds. We had chosen built-for-government with FAMIS, why would we choose something not built-for-government now.

AMS Advantage ERP was built from the ground up specifically for government – and CGI’s investment continues to focus solely on the needs of state and local government. When we looked at those critical areas, accounting, budgeting, encumbrances, reporting, etc, AMS Advantage ERP was the strongest solution.

The functionality is comprehensive, and it is highly configurable - instead of changing our processes to work how the product works, we configured the product to support our business. As a result, we eliminated ancillary systems and the need for customization.

What are some of the benefits the County has achieved?
The move from FAMIS to AMS Advantage Financial Management was simple – the fundamental government business concepts and processes are the same. For example, FAMIS had Index Codes, which in AMS Advantage Financial Management are Accounting Templates. Overall, AMS Advantage ERP is intuitive and with the right communication, our people adapted very quickly.

This gave us a chance to focus on what was new – how we could use the new functionality to make things work better. For example, we moved a lot of the initial processing, such as contracts, out to the departments, eliminating paper, and introduced workflow for concurrent approvals. This also improved access to information – we can track where they are in the process, what was received but not processed, all online.

We had programs to allocate payroll costs from Genesys to FAMIS as Genesys did not have labor distribution. This caused a delay in getting accurate FAMIS budget reports once payroll had processed. With AMS Advantage HRM and Payroll, information is posted automatically, which streamlined the process and eliminated hundreds of hours of manual data entry to feed the cost allocation program and also improved reporting times to the state.

The limitations of BPREP required our budget office to maintain significant amounts of data outside the budget system. With the robustness of Performance Budgeting (PB), all budget development data is maintained within the PB system and we are able to access information faster – without paper and with an accuracy we can trust to drive our decisions. For example, our Services Matrix Report used for our Board of Commissioners automatically captures program and service goals and dollars by department (a process that used to take hundreds of hours to maintain in Excel).

Integration has been the biggest gain for the County. The full integration of AMS Advantage ERP eliminated the proliferation of systems, the associated costs of “manual integration”, and more importantly, the risk associated with keeping the side systems up and running. It is night and day in the AMS Advantage structure.

What would you tell someone considering AMS Advantage?
Ask yourself, what will it take to implement, run and maintain the new system? What staffing level is required? The County was able to implement, run, and currently maintains AMS Advantage ERP with only three additional positions across all of the departments. It does not take an army of IT professionals to operate.

Look at the system – will it meet the core fundamentals that make government unique? How hard will it be to force the system to meet those needs? For example, private sector does not budget or account for things the way government does – how much time and energy are you going to spend making the system work for government? What level of risk will that introduce to the project and the organization?

What is next for the County?
In October, we completed the roll out of electronic timesheets for all 4,000 employees, including online approvals. No more paper timesheets. In November, we completed our first online annual benefit enrollment using Employee Self Service very successfully.

We are just beginning to scratch the surface with AMS Advantage Performance Management and we are looking forward to upgrading the entire suite in the near future. We’ll be working in partnership with CGI on that as we move forward with our goals of fully utilizing AMS Advantage with NO side systems.