Clark County hits goals on SAP overhaul

Five thousand new residents a month show up in Clark County, Nevada, chasing the Las Vegas dream. The sprawling county covers an area the size of New Jersey, has a population of 1.7 million, and until late this year was running its collection of government agencies on a mishmash of aging mainframe applications. On Nov. 1, 40 Clark County agencies went live with a host of financial modules from SAP AG’s mySAP ERP 2004 suite, completing the first phase of a massive ERP (enterprise resource planning) overhaul that Clark County Chief Information Officer Rod Massey says is running on time and on budget.

Clark County has spent US$26.2 million so far to get up and running on SAP, and it expects to spend $38 million for the entire project by the time the county completes phase two, deploying new human resources and payroll systems. The county selected SAP in 2004 after a stringent procurement evaluation that also involved Oracle Corp., PeopleSoft and several smaller vendors. SAP wasn’t the low bidder, but the breadth of its software offerings and the user-friendly look-and-feel of its system helped it win Clark County’s business, Massey said.

Public sector ERP overhauls often make headlines when the projects devolve into expensive debacles. Massey attributes Clark County’s success so far to tight governance and the project team’s close partnership with SAP and systems integrator IBM Corp. IBM blade servers provide the hardware infrastructure for Clark County’s SAP implementation, which runs on Oracle’s database software.

While the overall project has met its goals to date, unexpected hurdles popped up along the way.

“It’s amazing the amount of time it can take to work through a particular business process flow,” Massey said. “One of the biggest challenges to me was the education and training. If I were to give others one suggestion, it’s that you can’t overemphasize the training. I think that the technology is the easy part.”

Phase one of Clark County’s project required training 2,600 county employees in 40 different agencies on using the county’s new assortment of SAP financial applications. Next year, it will begin the next phase of its back-office SAP standardization. After that, the county plans to begin revamping its public Web sites to enable online processing of citizen transactions like applying for business licenses and paying traffic tickets.

“We started with the back office because we didn’t want to create a nice pretty front end that the back end couldn’t live up to,” Massey said.

Among the systems Clark County will toss out is a 15-year-old, green-screen DecisionMaster financials system, the county court’s equally aged Blackstone case-management software and the McCarran International Airport’s J.D. Edwards ERP backbone. Migrating to a standardized SAP ERP implantation will free up Massey’s IT staff to concentrate on rolling out new services rather than maintaining legacy systems, he said.

“We’ll be more efficient over time as an organization because there’s less complexity to manage,” he said.