“Numerous stand-alone systems maintained at the enterprise level and in specific user agencies are required to meet the State’s administrative business needs. Currently, there are more than thirty-eight (38) systems that support human resources & payroll administration, and more than fifty-nine (59) systems that support financial management areas.
The State currently has no enterprise-wide procurement, asset management, or human resources systems in place.”
Enterprise Resource Planning System
Feasibility Study
Salvaggio, Teal & Assoc.
March 7, 2005
In addition, many of the large, complex administrative systems have been maintained for up to thirty years and have become increasingly inflexible. (Payroll and Budget are the prime examples.) Many of the staff with expertise necessary to support these systems are approaching retirement. The risk that one or more of these systems becomes impossible to maintain is growing.
Because the administrative systems were developed separately using a variety of platforms, database management systems and programming languages, they are difficult/impossible to interface cost effectively. The result is repetitious manual entry of data with associated costs and error rates. Any kind of management reporting to show an enterprise picture is impossible to present accurately or in a timely fashion. For instance, the State of Wisconsin cannot report on purchases by commodity group at either the agency or enterprise level using anything short of a manual screening of every historical purchase order, an effort too expensive to consider.
The State of Wisconsin would benefit from replacing its costly inventory of fragmented administrative systems with a single instance of an integrated, commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) software package. This kind of wide ranging functionality is present in Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) packages. ERP, however, represents a broad, integrated approach to capacity and production planning and customer relationship management (CRM) that is more than the State of Wisconsin requires to address the immediate need for integrated business systems.
IBIS (the Integrated Business Information System project) is intended to take advantage of ERP functionality without performing a full-scale ERP implementation. This approach reduces both the risk and the cost associated with typical ERP implementations.
The major functional modules that will form the basis for package selection will be Accounting, Budget, Human Resources, Payroll and Procurement. Any given package may divide these major areas differently. For instance, Procurement may be a function within Accounting in one package and a module in its own right in another.
It should be noted that the feasibility study, produced by Salvaggio, Teal & Assoc, (STA), made high level, not detailed, recommendations. Specific requirements generated during the system selection phase and costs of both software and implementation may dictate what detailed functions are actually implemented. As an example, Budget may be the most difficult set of requirements to meet. Depending on the outcome of the system selection, Budget may need to be broken out for a separate solution. Another potential example of the refinements that will be made to the initial project plan might be whether or not to implement project management or other functions not mentioned in the feasibility report but potentially having a positive ROI in their own right.
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