TEA Winner: Soos Creek Water & Sewer District

• Industry: Special district
• Location: Renton, Washington
• Number of Employees: 39
• Population: 114,000
• Tyler Client Since: 1986
• Tyler solutions used: Enterprise ERP [powered by Munis®], Cashiering, Content Manager, Enforcement Mobile [powered by Brazos™], Enterprise Asset Management, Enterprise Permitting & Licensing [powered by EnerGov™], Enterprise Service Requests

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Challenge

Because Soos Creek Water & Sewer District’s antiquated work order and payroll systems were not set up to communicate, the district faced the challenge of information silos, data duplication, and errors due to manually entering data multiple times.

Staff needed to take the data entered into its work order system and manually input it into its payroll system, which took a payroll specialist more than a day to enter and proof. The laborious task involved manual imports of data via Excel spreadsheets in order to allocate labor costs to each division and to enter that data into the general ledger.

“Our work order and payroll systems did not communicate with each other, and this resulted in a lot of manual data entries having to be entered,” says Michael McLeod, Soos Creek field specialist. “Taking one set of information and trying to import it into another system is a very time-consuming and tedious process, and we were looking to cut that down.”

Solution

To streamline operations, the district sought a seamlessly integrated solution that would allow staff to input their time in a work order system and then easily share that data for various reporting and analytical purposes.

The district’s goal was to:

• Speed up the time it took to process payroll

• Be able to track maintenance, repairs, and crucial information on all assets

• Have GIS data integrated with assets and work orders

• Easily create monthly, quarterly, and yearly reports to show the work the staff had accomplished during those timeframes

To achieve these goals, Soos Creek chose Tyler’s Enterprise Asset Management solution.

“We had been with Tyler since 1986, and so we were familiar with Tyler products. And we were looking for something to be able to use our asset management and get it all together in one place,” says Dustin Wilton, assistant field supervisor.

To get the most out of Enterprise Asset Management, the district pulled together a cross-divisional team to ensure the new system met the district’s needs. District subject matter experts and power users were included to ensure the solution implementation was vetted by them and to make sure they had bought into the solution.

Results

Thanks to the change, Soos Creek has saved more than a day of the payroll specialist’s time a month just by using the new systems’ SQL Server Reporting Services report that allows staff to import the work orders and job costing into payroll entry.

The new system also provides an invaluable tool for supervisors and managers of the field crew to analyze and view the tasks the staff is assigned to do to see where efficiencies can be gained. In addition, staff can use laptops, tablets, cellphones, or desktops to continue their work wherever they are, whether in the field, driving to another job, or in the office. This flexibility helps staff stay on track with past, current, and pending jobs.

Supervisors can now see the status of jobs without having to call or talk to the employees, and with the integration of GIS, it helps the field crew pinpoint where the next job is and cuts down on travel time. A bonus to the solution is that staff can track and set schedules for their jobs.

The move to Enterprise Asset Management has added up to increased efficiencies across the organization.

“The big wins are cutting down on our payroll processing time and streamlining the data between our departments,” says McLeod. “And also that our field crew can take advantage of the GIS integrations and track things like our asset performance and keep a work history of our assets.”