City of Port St. Lucie, Florida

Organization Profile

• City of Port St. Lucie, Florida
• Number of Employees: 1,100
• Tyler Client Since: 1996
• Tyler Products: Enterprise ERP, Content Manager

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Challenges

For more than 20 years, the city of Port St. Lucie, Florida, has been an Enterprise ERP client. Charlie Proulx, the city’s first innovation officer, had a vision. His goal was to prove to staff that Tyler’s ERP software is built to run every aspect of their organization from legal to finances to parks and recreation.

Solution

In order to achieve this, the city joined Tyler’s Planned Annual Continuing Education (PACE) program, which is designed to support Enterprise ERP clients who are committed to adopting new features and technical enhancements delivered each year as part of the solution’s annual release. The city quickly began a heavy training campaign, which targeted hundreds of staff. Users were shown capabilities of Enterprise ERP they didn’t know existed and learned how the solution is designed to work so they could eliminate data silos stemming from disparate software.

The city developed innovative ways to maximize the potential of Enterprise ERP and streamline current processes in order to increase revenues, improve customer services, save resources, and reduce errors and redundancies — without having to make a financial investment in new software.

Results

The city has already saved more than $250,000 annually due to increasing efficiencies with the software they already owned. For example, the city received 1,100 Florida Power and Light bills a week, with some bills containing up to 10 different accounts. This means that staff would manually enter up to 10,000 transactions into Enterprise ERP per week! This process would take one person 40 hours a week to complete, which inevitably resulted in human error.

In order to combat this issue, the city investigated accounts payable (AP) imports and developed a new process, which improved the entire workflow. It now takes fewer than 10 minutes to complete the entire task with a zero-error rate.

“Our city is not alone with the state of its ERP. Many organizations suffer similar issues as a result of siloed or neglected technology. Our goal is to be the road map for other organizations to follow in order to build a connected community,” said Proulx.

Proulx highlighted that one critical aspect of PACE’s success is the ongoing “Enterprise ERP core team” that the city created. This team is made up of representatives from major departments throughout the city. This has made the staff feel more valued and engaged within the process.

Historically, staff didn’t have the knowledge or dedicated training to find efficiencies on their own, but now employees are actively engaged and setting up newly tailored processes and procedures for their departments — at no cost.

The training program, which remains ongoing, was very well received by team members. Additional Enterprise ERP modules such as General Billing, Project and Grant Accounting, Bid Management, Contract Management, and Employee Expense Reimbursement, have been purchased as a result of the staff’s additional knowledge and education.