The Human Resources and Information Technology Committee met 04/23/2025. One of the items they received an update on what progress the city was making in moving its Enterprise Resource Planning system from an old and outdated in-house system called iSeries to a new system through Tyler Munis. The conversation particularly focused on the issued staff has faced moving Utility billing from iSeries to Tyler Munis.
I’ve prepared a transcript of the discussion for download:
Information Technology Department Director Corey Popp first talked with the committee back in June of 2023 regarding the sunsetting of the iSeries and the moving of city services over to Tyler Munis. At the time, he expressed concern regarding the 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.
Two years later, two of the three IT employees familiar with the iSeries system have retired. Thankfully, the remaining employee was the person who wrote the vast majority of the Utility billing section of the program which is valuable because the city is still in the process of moving Utility billing over to Tyler Munis.
They have been working on moving Utility billing over to Tyler Munis since June of 2023 nearly 2 years ago. The delay has been because there is a lot involved in utility billing. Per Director Popp, “So, what utilities does every account have? That’s every home and commercial business in the city. So, do you have trash pickup? Do you have water? Do you have sewer? If you’re a business, do you have exception meters? Does some water that you take into the business go out through the sewer, and does other product leave through evaporation or go into a product that have to go through exception meters? There’s all these kinds of things that go into it. You can’t even do a balance forward until all those services are attached to correct accounts on Tyler Munis.”
Additionally, Utility billing is an extremely visible, public-facing thing. Director Popp explained to the committee things like asset management and content management are internal tools used by city employees. If there is a problem converting those systems over to Tyler Munis it is not visible to residents. But, if there is a problem converting the Utility billing to Tyler Munis and the city sends out tens of thousands of incorrect utility bills, it will be extremely visible to the public.
Throughout this conversion process, they have been running the balances on both systems and, in the past, have been millions of dollars off on those balance. The last time they ran the balances on both systems, however, they were off by only $100-$200. Per Director Popp, “That’s an error that can be corrected post conversion without a huge impact to the resident.”
The next stage of the conversion will be to run parallel bills which they will do starting May 1st. They will run bills on iSeries and on Tyler Munis and match them to make sure they come out correctly.
The conversion date is scheduled for 07/29/2025. This was the 5th or 6th date they had scheduled the conversion, but Director Popp was optimistic it would work this time and referenced the memo from Mayor Woodford stating that the conversion would result in major, resident-effecting problems with the bills residents would receive they would be going live at this point.
After this conversion is completed they will have one more module to convert pertaining to Permitting and Licensing. Right now they are scheduled to start working on that starting September 1, one month after the Utility billing conversion is completed, but Director Popp expected that would very likely change. He estimated the conversion would take about a year to complete. They were looking to be fully off the iSeries system by the end of 2026. [The original deadline estimated in 2023 had been December of 2025.]
Alderperson Patrick Hayden (District 7) asked if there were savings or efficiencies they were expecting with the move to the new system.
Director Popp said that the main issue was that iSeries was obsolete and support was no longer available for it. There was one company willing to provide support and that company was not able to supply parts. The city had actually had to go to Ebay and purchase two used iSeries systems so that it had extra parts on hand for the maintenance company to use. Per Director Popp, “[I]t’s not a matter of cost savings. We’re well beyond that. We’re into a whole new mode of, we have to keep the city running. We have to produce a utility bill. We have to produce—or we have to be able to receive property taxes. This is business continuity. This really isn’t efficiency.”
View full meeting details and video here: https://cityofappleton.legistar.com/MeetingDetail.aspx?ID=1297287&GUID=4EB5A11D-A05D-459C-BFDA-6BC3D2FA0FAC
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