Davie, Florida

• Industry: Municipality
• Location: Davie, Florida
• Number of Employees: 737
• Population: 105,000
• Tyler Client Since: 2009
• Tyler Products Used: New World ERP, Tyler Disaster Recovery

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Challenges

In 2009, the town of Davie, Florida, acquired New World ERP to help manage their financial, HR, and procurement processes. However, after implementing the updated system, the solution’s full funtionalty wasn’t immediately adopted, which left them with labor-intensive, inefficient, and antiquated processes.

It was difficult to tell when contracts were going to expire, causing contract lapses and major delays in re-soliciting products and services. Check request forms required a manual routing and approval process that had many issues, causing delayed payments to vendors, which delayed the recording of encumbrance against accounts and hindered accountability and tracking of documents, causing the loss of records.

Solution

When the town identified the issue, the purchasing team brainstormed solutions and reached out to Tyler for assistance. “We were previously using the invoice entry module only with accounts payable, and there was no workflow established, no review of information keyed in, and the amount of data entered was limited,” said Brian O’Connor, purchasing manager. “We were not certain the module could be customized to fit the town of Davie’s particular needs.”

With Tyler’s assistance, the purchasing division worked with the town’s IT department to create a customized, decentralized module which maximized accountability.

In November 2017, the contracts system module was fully implemented, and term contracts are now stored in the New World ERP system. The milestone function — included in the contract module — sends out notifications of contract expiration dates. In conjunction with the requisitioning and purchase order (PO) process, departments can link contracts to requisitions, view contract documents and pricing for compliance, and track the spend on contracts for accurate data. Documents are also stored for contract performance as insurance record keeping.

In addition, the purchasing team conducted one-on-one training sessions with each employee designated to enter invoice batches and approve them. Using the New World ERP test site, each employee was able to practice inputting and approving invoice batch entries until the employee was fully trained. After that, the employee was granted access to start entering invoice batches in the live New World ERP system. This project was town-wide and affected the payment process for each department. By September 2020, each of the town’s 17 departments and divisions had completed training and were actively using the accounts payable invoice entry batches module.

Results

The outcome of the solution was a more efficient and effective payment process. By implementing this solution, they have seen a tremendous return on investment. Prior to this new process, there were several incidents where duplicate invoices were submitted and were not caught until the end of the payment process. Now, duplicate invoices are caught during entry, saving time and money.

With multiple authorized staff at each level — from entry to approval — colleagues can now assist each other much more easily. During the COVID-19 pandemic, if a staff member wasn’t able to work, then other authorized users could access and carry out the entry or approval process in their absence. Another benefit is the amount of time saved during the approval process — once something is entered and approved, it is instantly viewable by those in the approval chain and invoices are processed much quicker. Finally, through updated processes, the town has almost eliminated duplicate payments from occurring. If a duplicate invoice is entered for payment, it is flagged as an error and stopped at the entry level.