The Human Resources and Information Technology Committee met 06/28/2023. One of the information items they received was an update from Information Technology Director Corey Popp regarding the sunsetting of the city’s old Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system now that it was moving all of its services over to Tyler Munis.
I’ve prepared a transcript of the discussion for download:
The old system was an in-house system called iSeries. Director Popp didn’t know the original date it had been implemented, but it was at least 20 years old. Now that the city was moving all of its systems over to the Tyler Munis ERP system, they had no need for iSeries and planned to sunset it by 12/31/2025. At that point, iSeries would only be used for archival purposes until the data was offloaded to alternative platforms or purged in compliance with the City’s records retention policy.
Director Popp said that it cost about $6,000 a year to keep a company on hand to provide hardware maintenance for the system. His main concern was a loss of people who could maintain the programming part of the system. They were facing retirements in the IT Department, and because the system was custom-made it would be difficult to get new programmers in who could work with the system.
Director Popp had provided an implementation schedule to the committee. Alderperson Alex Schultz (District 9) pointed out that it looked like a lot of work was done in 2018 and 2019 but then for the last three years it appeared the city had been trying to move over the tax/billing/collections from iSeries to Tyler Munis. He wondered if they had been running into any issues.
Director Popp said he could not speak about anything that had happened before his arrival. He had heard anecdotes as to why movement to the new system had slowed after 2019, but he did n’t feel it was appropriate to talk about that on the record. He said that they were moving forward now and had momentum, and the property taxes had been moved to the new system on time last year. He felt good about the pace they were now on.
He also explained that he was working to get all of the revenue moved over to the new system first. Property taxes were moved last year, and they would get utility billing moved this year. At that point 95-98% of the city’s revenue would be coming into the new Tyler Munis system which was a really critical portion of what they needed to accomplish.
View full meeting details and video here: https://cityofappleton.legistar.com/MeetingDetail.aspx?ID=1109802&GUID=9F4013C6-F8C9-4DCE-A17E-73D2E3DD1CA4
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