• Key Objectives and Outcomes: o Enhance operational effectiveness with an online portal by making more timely, accurate, and complete information available to citizens, Town personnel, and vendors o Improve internal and external communications using information technology o Enhance workflows to support increased automation and operational efficiencies by streamlining business processes o Increase productivity by eliminating redundancy and unnecessary and manual tasks o Enhance Utility Billing work orders workflow and reporting o Improve Utility Billing customer service portal and billing formatting and process • Primary Challenges in the Current Environment o The Town does not track fixed assets, and the subsequent asset depreciation within the current system. Fixed asset tracking is completed outside of the system in MS Excel. The Town would benefit from the capabilities to flag fixed assets at the time of purchase, add asset attributes (e.g., useful life), and track asset depreciation within a new system. o Automating workflow and integration between financial and human capital modules would enhance the efficiencies, productivity and reduce the amount of work done in third-party systems such as MS Word or Excel. o The current system lacks online portal capabilities. The use of online portals (vendor self-service and ESS) to remove the burden of staff managing documentation and placing that on the vendor or individual would improve efficiencies, reduce the amount of hardcopy paper handled, reduce manual keying of data, and ultimately increase efficiency throughout the organization. o The Town relies heavily on paper and/or MS Excel worksheets to build the budget and perform trend and forecasting analysis. The Town would benefit from a modern system that will enable staff to perform and research these tasks within the confines of a single system. o Timekeeping and payroll is a manual, paper-driven process that is susceptible to human error. The Town desires a new system to send time to the appropriate reviewers for approval, and then flow into the payroll module. This would greatly reduce the amount of data staff needs to manually key in to process pay, ultimately streamlining the end-to-end process and reducing the chance of human error. o The Town desires the future Utility Billing system to interface with GIS for asset inventorying and tracking purposes (e.g., tracking transformers by serial numbers, mapping manholes, and mapping underground transmission systems).
