Municipal finance systems (ERP)

["Ericsson, Paul" <PEricsson at onconcord dot com>]

Colleagues --

Please excuse any cross-postings and the secondary relationship of some
of these questions to III.

Our City has recently completed a needs assessment regarding the
municipal finance system and related applications for payroll,
personnel, budget preparation, tax assessment, utilities billing. It is
no surprise to employees that work in any of our City departments,
whether it be Police, Recreation, Social Services or Library, that the
existing system is functionally and technically out-of-date, and not
meeting the needs of the City employees. 

My question for other public library folks is: What has been your
library's experience as a municipal department using the ERP (enterprise
resource planning) system from your town or city? What is the system and
who is the vendor? How long have you been online with the system? What
was your upgrade/migration like from the previous system? What
functional modules do you actually use in your Library? Do you have any
interfaces and uploading of data between III and your ERP system,
especially with regard to III acquisitions purchase orders, payments,
and fund accounting? And for comparison - how many citizens are in your
community? 

The staff at our library are looking forward to the implementation of
this new ERP system. My experience as a middle manager in our Library is
that I am at a loss to know  what the status is of a purchase order, how
much "official money" I have left in our book accounts compared to the
"unofficial money" that my III acquisitions system reports, how many
hours my part-time workers have used this fiscal year, and the list of
un-met needs goes on and on.  Most middle managers, administrative
assistants, and departments heads in the City have self-created Excel
spreadsheets and Access databases galore to provide us with data so we
can manage our departments. But none of it is integrated so there is
redundant data entry, contradictory data, "information silos" and
overall a lack of accurate management information. We have a significant
amount of funds that are not in synch between our III acq reports and
the City's finance system, and the year-end-roll is a nightmare to
coordinate with the City system because those reports lack meaningful
data to compare to MilAcq.

Thank you for any information and opinions that you can provide
regarding your municipal system for budget, finance, personnel, payroll
and other applications.

Paul

	___________________________________________

	Paul Ericsson
	Adult Services Supervisor / Automation Coordinator
	Concord Public Library    http://www.onconcord.com
	45 Green St.     Concord, NH 03301     603 230-3697
	pericsson at onconcord dot com
	___________________________________________