Full implementation of Marin County’s new computer system — already delayed more than a year — has once again been pushed back.
The county initially expected the system to be completely operational in 2017, then rescheduled it for the end of 2018 before again moving the target to the first quarter of 2020.
“We were trying to hit Dec. 15, which would have been for the first pay period in January,” said Angela Nicholson, an assistant county administrator.
Nicholson began overseeing the project with Rwena Holaday, assistant director of the information services and technology department, after Tim Flanagan, the IT department’s enterprise systems manager, left for a job in Solano County in January.
“We’re waiting for a patch that is going to come in the middle of January,” Nicholson said. She said it is difficult to predict now when the system will go live.
“It would just be a guess at this point, until I know the patch is going to work,” Nicholson said. “Now that we’re changing configurations we’re going to want to do another complete test.”
Nicholson said the patch is needed for the system to accurately calculate the pay for county employees who work a special schedule that allows them to work a four-day week twice a month by working eight nine-hour shifts and one eight-hour shift per two-week pay period.
Under the federal Fair Labor Standards Act, employees who work more than 40 hours in a work week must be paid overtime. To allow employees to work this alternative schedule without paying them overtime, the county ends the first work week at noon on the first Friday, effectively carrying the other four hours over to the next work week.
“What we found in the last round of testing is that the calculation for the pay for those employees was off by a few cents,” Nicholson said. “Even though it wasn’t a huge dollar amount, having any pay wrong for employees wasn’t going to work so we decided to delay.”
Installation of the first phase of the new system began in February 2015 with the design of new finance software. The software went live on schedule in July 2016. Payroll and human resource components of the system were next, but both have proved problematic.
The county has struggled with computer systems before. It installed a $30 million SAP computer and software system in 2006 that became so problematic and expensive to maintain that officials abandoned it four years later. The county sued the vendors, alleging bribery and fraud, and spent $5 million on the litigation before settling the case for $3.9 million.
“There were so many lessons learned by us in the SAP implementation,” Nicholson said. “We’ve been extra cautious.”
One big difference this time is that the county has a “not-to-exceed” contract with the vendor, Texas-based Tyler Technologies.
“We’re still under budget for the project,” County Administrator Matthew Hymel told supervisors when he alerted them to the latest delay.
The county has budgeted $14 million for the new computer system and its installation. The bulk, $8.2 million, is being paid to Tyler. The spending estimates, however, don’t include the cost of having six county employees working on the project full time.
There have been a couple of reasons for previous delays. One was the county’s request for system modifications in the human resources and payroll software that required Tyler to upgrade the finance software to the next version of its software. Another was Tyler’s acquisition of Executime, a third-party vendor, in the midst of the installation of the new system.
“My main message as the project manager,” Nicholson said, “is that we’re just committed to getting it right.”
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December 10, 2019 at 04:32AM
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Marin County’s new computer system delayed again - Marin Independent Journal
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