Cobb County, GA Improves Performance with Release 3.7
Cobb County, Georgia upgraded to the web-based AMS Advantage 3 Financial Management and Human Resources Management solution in September 2003 as part of a successful, twelve-month project that included a year-end conversion and a retire of a mainframe lease. Since then they have expanded their operations to include Vendor Self Service (VSS) and BRASS for budgeting.
 Today the County handles the disbursement of over 5,000 payroll clients every other week, the budget loads faster with less manual intervention for more accuracy and the overall time of the purchasing lifecycle is running faster. Tiffany Kight, Cobb County Finance Department, joined us this month to share how the upgrade to Release 3.7 helped reduce this time.
Tiffany has worked for Cobb County for 13 years and has been in the finance department for 10 years. She has been in her current position as the System Support Specialist for the Financial System for 6 years. Tiffany is the first person that their 500 financial users call when they have an issue or a question in the system. She serves as the security administrator, teaches classes to train users and coordinates month end and year-end processes in finance.
Can you walk us through the situation?
We have been running Release 3.3 since October 2003 and our year-end jobs were running quite long. For example, Open Activity Roll, including our 784 activity lines, ran for three hours and our Open Activity and Budget Roll ran for four hours. With jobs taking this long to run, we had to keep the end users out of the system for about two days for pre-processing, running jobs and processing tasks.
When it came to system assurance, SA1 ran for eight or nine hours, so it was only able to run once a month. By the time we got the reports at the end of the month, we had to sift through a month's worth of data to find any problems, and by then the problems were already impacting other areas of the organization.
What kind of impact did the upgrade to Release 3.7 have?
Our year-end is in September and we went live in August. When it came time to rollover to the New Year, we planned for the run-times we'd seen in the past. To our delight, the times were cut in half; Open Activity Roll ran in 40 minutes and Open Activity and Budget Roll ran in an hour. In addition, there was less clean up to get through the jobs, which allowed us to bring the system up a day earlier than expected.
SA1 also ran faster which means we can run it every night, see the report every day and correct any issues immediately. It also leaves us time to run other system assurance jobs which is something we're looking at now.
What else changed in Release 3.7?
Payroll and PAM are also running a lot faster; prior to 3.7, it took us 26-28 hours to run a bi-weekly payroll process completely through. In 3.7, it is taking approximately 12 hours to run the bi-weekly payroll process completely through, and sometimes less. Some of this is due to housekeeping on our part that occurred during the upgrade process, however, all payroll jobs are running in about half the time that it took before. That had a big impact on our Payroll Department, especially this being an election year. We typically pay 5,000 full time employees every other week, but this year we had to run a series of supplemental payrolls to pay our poll employees, and that includes primaries, elections, runoffs, etc. So having Payroll running faster gave us the time we needed to run all of the payrolls, pay everyone on time and still get our Payroll folks home in time for dinner.
In addition, we were an early adopter of Vendor Self Service and the usual challenges that come along with a new, innovative product. In Release 3.7, VSS is far more user-friendly, and that is helping us encourage our vendors to get on-board.
What is next for the County?
We are excited about Employee Self Service, how it can help us be more efficiency and transparent to our employees, but for now, it is on the back burner. We are currently still using our old COBOL reports against the production system. So another goal for the future is setting up a Data Warehouse to help us create more specific, more detailed reports.
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