TORONTO, November 8, 2009 – A group of municipalities working to build a roadmap to guide their policies and practices with respect to ERP technologies has, for the first time, created a program to define the reforms they want.

The ERP Municipal Users’ Special Interest Group of 14 municipalities has agreed to present to vendors of ERP solutions an 11-point reform program. It sets down the negotiating position that the group members will use in future when considering the purchase or upgrading of technologies usually found in ERP (enterprise-resource-planning) systems.

The reform program was approved by representatives of the group at a meeting September 23 during Showcase Ontario at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre.

Fixing Relationships

Louis Shallal, founder of the group and chief information technology officer of York Region, said at the meeting that creation of the 11-point program responds to the requests of ERP vendors who have asked for specific information about how municipalities want vendors to improve relationships with them.

“We are saying to the vendors, ‘We believe that you should listen to us, and here’s what we want from you.’ When we meet with them individually we will say, ‘Here, we want a direct response telling us what you will do.’ ”

The action items of the program are:

1. Develop an industry-based pricing model for licence and maintenance contracts
2. Develop a bulk purchase model for software products
3.  Develop a shared-service delivery model for the municipalities to evaluate
4. Develop a framework to enable licence exchange – module for module
5. Develop a framework to enable municipalities to direct a portion of maintenance fees to develop features and products to address specific needs
6. Develop a framework to permit municipalities to reinstate modules that had been dropped from maintenance
7. Develop a framework to permit municipalities to drop maintenance fees on unused modules within an existing contract to reduce maintenance costs
8. Increase training options for Canadian clients
9. Develop implementation tools/scripts to reduce delivery time for modules and functions, including:
• Pre-built configuration examples
• Scripted configuration for basic implementations of functions and workflows.
10. Develop extended solutions for processes, including:
• Work with clients to design solutions to common problems (for example, PSAB)
• Combine core and partner systems to build integrated processes
11. Establish a collaboration environment for exchange of customizations and knowledge including:
• Open forum to trade customizations, reports and bolt-ons
• Non-supported but adopted functions licensed for all.

Provincial Discussions

The special-interest group, which has been operating under the auspices of MISA/ASIM Canada since mid-2008, has also entered into discussions with the Province of Ontario to see whether one or more bulk purchasing agreements could be negotiated for the licensing and support of ERP solutions covering both the province and municipalities.

Those discussions are led by Bruno Mangiardi, chief information officer of the City of Greater Sudbury.

York Region, meanwhile, has undertaken two projects of its own to explore alternative means of obtaining maintenance services for its ERP system, other than to have services exclusively provided by the vendor.

The Region is evaluating responses it received from an RFP with a deadline of October 9, seeking a consultant to conduct a feasibility study to determine what risks and opportunities would arise if the Region hired third-party services for its ERP application support.

Secondly, the IT department is writing an RFP to be issued by the end of the year, seeking a third-party vendor to provide regulatory and tax updates for the payroll module. This would for a one-year pilot project of using 3rd-party support services for the ERP systems.