{"id":19726,"date":"2018-10-04T13:28:00","date_gmt":"2018-10-04T13:28:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/statescoop.scpnewsgrp.com\/cook-county-overcomes-tremendous-amount-of-skepticism-to-complete-75-million-erp-upgrade\/"},"modified":"2021-09-03T10:31:24","modified_gmt":"2021-09-03T14:31:24","slug":"cook-county-illinois-erp-upgrade-ibm-oracle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/statescoop.com\/cook-county-illinois-erp-upgrade-ibm-oracle\/","title":{"rendered":"Cook County overcomes ‘tremendous amount of skepticism’ to complete $75 million ERP upgrade"},"content":{"rendered":"

Cook County, Illinois, recently capped an $75\u00a0million IT project that was nearly 10 years in the making and addressed operations that had languished for decades.<\/p>\n

Officials told StateScoop that\u00a0they put the\u00a0final touches Monday on an IBM\/Oracle upgrade of the county’s ERP, or enterprise resource planning system, the back-office hub that ties all of an organization’s services together. Leading up that day,\u00a0Cook County’s\u00a0main challenge had been to overcome\u00a0decades of IT neglect. A unique political structure and tradition of scrimping on technology purchases left the county with eight separate ERP systems that hadn’t been patched or updated since being installed more than 20 years ago.<\/p>\n

IBM implemented the\u00a0” mammoth undertaking <\/a> ” in\u00a0seven\u00a0phases: finance and procurement; budget and financial reporting; human resources, payroll\u00a0and benefits; inventory and contract management; single sign-on access; mobile supply chain; and personnel review for the county’s\u00a0hospital system.<\/p>\n

Tom Lynch, the county’s chief information officer, said he\u00a0considers the upgrade project an unmitigated success, but that\u00a0completing it\u00a0included a learning curve and\u00a0a few uncomfortable moments.<\/p>\n

“The county did not have a tradition of enterprisewide projects,” Lynch said. “That was a new concept to many of the elected offices. So, to a large extent we had to convince them that moving to this shared model would be better for them.”<\/p>\n

Cook County has 10\u00a0elected offices that enjoy high levels of autonomy and operate their own information technology\u00a0departments. Even though\u00a0Toni\u00a0Preckwinkle, the county board president, supported the project, that alone wasn’t enough to get every office in the county to cooperate.<\/p>\n

There wasn’t\u00a0strong support from across the county, Lynch said, so his strategy was to start with a single office where he could show the value the project could deliver.\u00a0At the same time the ERP upgrade was underway, the county was also launching its first enterprisewide IT project\u00a0\u2014\u00a0a new time-and-attendance system.<\/p>\n

“When we first started that project there was a tremendous amount of skepticism that it would fly and die \u2014 that you may get it under the office of the president but you wouldn’t get everyone else to use it,” Lynch said.<\/p>\n

Eventually, other offices saw the value of both projects,\u00a0and today,\u00a0all of the county’s 22,000 employees sit on a common ERP.\u00a0Jill Ruzevick, director of enterprise resource planning, said that since Aug. 15, 12,000 people have logged on, which she considers a sign of success.<\/p>\n

“As we enter the support phase, we see that people’s trust and patience has grown,” Ruzevick said.<\/p>\n

Multiple delays <\/strong><\/p>\n

The county demurred from\u00a0an ERP upgrade in 2009, and again in 2011.\u00a0Lynch attributed the delays to\u00a0the county’s procurement process and\u00a0a general feeling that they weren’t ready yet. In 2012, the county finally issued\u00a0a request for proposals after gathering information on ERP solutions, selecting\u00a0Oracle’s E-Business Suite the following year.<\/p>\n

Also in\u00a02013,\u00a0the county hired Lynch as its\u00a0director of enterprise resource planning \u2014\u00a0the position now held by Ruzevick \u2014\u00a0to\u00a0lead the\u00a0project. His office began searching for an implementation\u00a0vendor and eventually settled on IBM,\u00a0which\u00a0would take on implementation, hosting and maintenance services under a single contract.<\/p>\n

When the\u00a0project finally\u00a0got underway in 2014, it included not just a technical implementation of the new software,\u00a0but an analysis\u00a0and mapping of the county’s processes. Lynch found that while\u00a0county staff knew how they did their jobs, their protocols and processes were\u00a0mostly\u00a0undocumented.<\/p>\n

The county had, for example, a catalog of more than 100 collective bargaining agreements with about 350 union locals.\u00a0Lynch said integrating the logic and process\u00a0of those\u00a0agreements into a technology framework was highly complex, but once the first offices starting using the system, “we bought credibility,” Lynch said. “Folks started to believe that we could in fact do what we were saying and have a solution that met their respective needs.”<\/p>\n

Lynch and IBM were then\u00a0able to start implementing more sensitive functions, like human resources. He said that it was a challenge\u00a0to get\u00a0county employees\u00a0to understand that this upgrade couldn’t be accomplished with technology alone \u2014 their expertise of how the county government worked was integral to success of the project as they began considering\u00a0and authoring\u00a0technical requirements.<\/p>\n

“That was a big cultural change for a lot of our users,” Lynch said. “They just weren’t used to being part of that process.”<\/p>\n

New functions, more value <\/strong><\/p>\n

Lynch said the project has been both a financial and operational success.\u00a0Previously, Cook County\u00a0was paying about\u00a0$12 million annually to operate eight distinct\u00a0ERPs. The IBM ERP is nearly the same cost at around $12.5 million annually, including hosting and some support and licensing, but provides “far more functionality.”<\/p>\n

One critical new function is disaster recovery, which\u00a0the old system did not have.\u00a0The Oracle applications the county uses are hosted in IBM’s private cloud environment, IBM Cloud for Oracle, a fully managed\u00a0IT infrastructure library that can provide automatic failover if a server goes down.<\/p>\n

The county was also able to automate some of its unnecessary and time-consuming manual processes and cut back on paper use.<\/p>\n

“In the old system, every time a requisition was placed by an office, a budget analyst would have to approve the funding,” Lynch said. A computer can now validate purchase orders against an already-approved budget, cutting two weeks on the process, he said.<\/p>\n

Completing the ERP upgrade has also provided the county and its staff a level of experience and knowledge about enterprise IT that will carry over in the coming years, he said.<\/p>\n

“It feels really good,” Lynch said. “More than just about this project, but it really has given lessons learned on how to do these types of projects for the county generally.”<\/p>\n

This story was updated after publication to correct the value of the IBM contract, which is approximately $75 million, not *87 million. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Officials of the Chicago-area municipality tick off the benefits of combining eight outdated systems into a single modern solution for all 22,000 county employees.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":205,"featured_media":19727,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"disable_grayscale_images":true,"grayscale_contrast":0,"sponsored_content":false,"display_author_bio":true,"story_type":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4675,20647],"tags":[4,5,29,83,323,1307,2590],"people":[],"special-report":[],"authors":[4696],"class_list":["post-19726","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-county-local","category-modernization","tag-tech-news","tag-it-infrastructure","tag-states","tag-modernization","tag-illinois","tag-enterprise-resource-planning-erp","tag-cook-county","author-colin-wood"],"yoast_head":"\nCook 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