TEA Winner 2021: New Castle County, DE
- Industry: Municipality
- Location: New Castle County, Delaware
- Number of Employees: 2,114
- Population: Approx. 561,160
- Tyler Client Since: 2014
- Tyler Products Used: Enterprise ERP, Content Manager, Enterprise Public Safety, Open Finance, Time & Attendance
Challenge
Before fiscal year 2021, New Castle County, Delaware, used a 20-year-old legacy financial system with a failing server to conduct operations — a major risk to the county. After IT and finance conducted a complete analysis of the legacy software and assessed the future needs of the organization and its customers, the county started the search for a cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution that would modernize business operations.
Critical factors driving the decision-making process included the desire for a fully integrated workflow-based solution to navigate end-users; self-service capabilities to empower business partners; and dashboard reporting for visibility into budget, expenses, receivables, and cash flow.
Other critical goals included eliminating offline spreadsheets and cumbersome steps to archive operational documents. Accounting also needed the right partner to help redesign the chart of accounts and to realign converted financial records with the current organizational structure.
Solution
After presentations from multiple vendors and recommendations from neighboring counties, New Castle County chose Tyler Technologies’ Enterprise ERP as its integrated ERP software solution.
Michael Smith, chief finance officer shared, “Aside from having the most comprehensive out-of-the-box functionality including self-service capabilities, what ultimately led us to select Enterprise ERP was Tyler’s implementation support and public sector insights endorsed by existing clients in neighboring Delaware municipalities.”
Results
When Enterprise ERP went live, three years of verified financial data was available in a cleansed repository. In just 18 months, the county implemented self-service capabilities; streamlined purchasing; automated receivables and cash receipting; enabled robust project accounting, grant management and highly flexible budgeting capabilities; and redesigned its chart of accounts to promote financial GAAP/GASB reporting compliance. Accounting projects using the ACFR workflow-based report builder will reduce year-end reporting by weeks.
New Castle County benefits from using Tyler products because their software considers inherent government operations and citizen outreach. Future development is unrestricted because our strategy to adopt Tyler best practices with no customization means the solution is scalable.
Michael Hojnicki
Chief of Technology
Adopting Tyler software out of the box enabled county operations to achieve significant efficiencies. eProcurement allows staff to buy goods and services online where shopping cart transactions are automatically applied to the digital requisition, greatly reducing purchasing lead times. Content Manager made purchasing entirely paperless.
Leveraging Open Finance, Tyler’s data and insights solution that enables public sector entities to apply principles of transparency with financial data from Enterprise ERP, the county was able to show how CARES Act funds were allocated for qualified Coronavirus expenses within 30 days after implementation.
“From a technology perspective, cloud solutions eliminate hardware costs, ongoing maintenance, and operations costs,” Hojnicki added. “County leadership predicts ROI will materialize from process efficiencies and improved quality of financial data.”