Agenda Report
Fullerton City Council
MEETING DATE: APRIL 5, 2022
TO: CITY COUNCIL / SUCCESSOR AGENCY
FROM: JEFFREY W. COLLIER, ACTING CITY MANAGER
PREPARED BY: ELLIS CHANG, DIRECTOR OF ADMINISTRATIVE SERVICES SUBJECT: AMENDMENT NUMBER TWO TO PROFESSIONAL SERVICES AGREEMENT WITH GLASS BOX TECHNOLOGY, INC. – ONES UPGRADE
SUMMARY
Request for ratification of Amendment Number Two to Professional Services Agreement with Glass Box Technology, Inc. (Glass Box) to add additional hours to support the ONES ERP software upgrade and related consulting services under the IT Infrastructure Emergency Project Professional Services Agreement approved and amended by City Council respectively on January 21, 2020 and January 19, 2021.
RECOMMENDATION
Ratify Amendment Number Two to Professional Services Agreement with Glass Box Technology, Inc. for continued project management and related consulting support for the ONES upgrade project.
BUDGET POLICY PRIORITY STATEMENT
This item matches the following Budget Policy Priority Statement:
Fiscal and Organizational Stability.
FISCAL IMPACT
No net budgetary impact across Fiscal Year 2019-20, FY 2020-21 and FY 2021-22. The IT Infrastructure Emergency Project (subprogram 6359) approved in FY 2020-21 originally included the ONES Upgrade Project Phase I with an initial estimated cost of $628,000. Due to implementation delays, the City needs an additional $45,000 to complete go-live, support steady state activities and initiate preliminary Phase II ONES upgrade and other related projects. The IT Infrastructure Emergency Project (subprogram 6359) has $324,000 available in project balance from FY 2020-21 carried over in FY 2021-22 to support the $45,000 request. Staff will carry over any available remaining project balance at the end of this fiscal year to FY 2022-23 to support Phase II activities. This request requires no additional appropriation to the Information Technology Fund (Fund 68).
DISCUSSION
City Council approved Phase I of the IT Infrastructure Emergency Project on January 21, 2020 in the amount of $2,565,200 for implementation of hardware and software upgrades to create a secure information technology environment. Part of this original approval included upgrades the City’s outdated ONES ERP financial and human resource software. ONES is the core financial and human resource software utilized by the City for vital operations such as personnel management, payroll processing, accounts payable, purchasing, budgeting and financial reporting. The scope of work continues to support upgrading the ONES Enterprise Financial and Human Resource system from version 16.4 to 20.1, supported by an ERP Project Manager, ERP Analyst, Application Developer and a Database Programmer (Attachment 1). The City divided the project into two phases.
Phase I
The Phase I project migrates ONES from version 16.4 (which the software provider would no longer support as of March 2021) to version 20.1.
During the Phase I project discovery phase, staff identified a number of customizations, most notably: an external program and process to handle ACH data, custom screen masks including Claim Vouchers and Cashiering and an external program and process to handle CalPERS calculations. These customizations are costly and time consuming to maintain both internally and with every ONES hotfix or version upgrade. The v20.1 Phase I testing phase rendered these customizations “broken”. Staff deemed that they could no longer maintain these customizations due to security risks, the need to eliminate additional costs for external maintenance and to avoid future potential system failures. By leveraging native functionality within the ONES program, the project team developed, implemented and trained on solutions not previously implemented by the City.
The project team set the original Phase I upgrade completion date (“go-live”) by July 2021. Due to vendor system instability issues, the team postponed the go-live date to September 2021 and again to March 2022. While the City has met CentralSquare’s technical specifications, the errors have persisted. The City continues to work with CentralSquare to resolve the system instability and engaged CentralSquare’s cloud team to assist. The City is also looking internally at alternative technical solutions to move forward with the tentative April 22, 2022 go-live date. After go-live, Glass Box will provide steady state activity as well as issue resolution support and ongoing consulting services for completion of Phase I upgrade projects, some high priority Phase II enhancements and other related consulting support initiated during the delays to go-live.
Phase II
The Phase II implementation will further develop the native software functionality to enhance operational efficiencies and improve controls for various departments across the City.
The proposed FY 2022-23 budget will include the Phase II request. As indicated, the IT Infrastructure Emergency Project (subprogram 6359) budget will have sufficient funding to carry over into FY 2022-23 to support the major Phase II improvements that will enable and improve operational efficiencies and controls. Such gains will include:
Chart of Accounts (COA) which will alleviate the lack of numbers due to the current structure of reduced character fields and integrates Tyler and ONES to provide the proper reporting functionality necessary implement the use of retroactive pay calculations
improvements to the requisition system workflow and approval process to help streamline processes for not just the Human Resources and Administrative Services Departments but also all other departments.
Additional gains include improvements to security by further looking into the security role structure within the native system to ensure appropriately delegated access to data. Finally, the project team will work on automation and enhancements throughout the entirety of Phase II to streamline system workflows, reporting by role and/or function and minimize duplicate data entry to reduce errors and redundancy which should benefit multiple departments across the City.
Attachments:
Attachment 1 – Amendment Number Two to Professional Services Agreement Attachment 2 – Amendment Number One to Professional Services Agreement Attachment 3 – Professional Services Agreement with Glass Box Technology, Inc.
PSA Glass Box Amendment Number Two
April 5, 2022 - Page 3