Peoria, Arizona

Challenge
The City of Peoria Arizona implemented a new Utility Billing, Cashiering, Miscellaneous Accounts Receivable and License & Sales Tax system in the fall of 1999 due to Y2K concerns. Few vendors responded to the City’s RFP for new systems, leaving the City few alternative choices. This resulted in systems which were both technically inferior and severely lacking in functionality.

Solution
TMG was originally engaged by the City to perform a review and analysis of the Revenue Division’s software and systems. TMG conducted interviews with 45 City employees. Overwhelmingly, the opinion was that the systems were cumbersome, inflexible, difficult to use, system response time was very slow, and almost impossible to get changed. Additionally, the systems had limited data access methods to support access, manipulation and reporting of information. The vendor’s support for the system was poor, response to requests was slow. Of the individuals interviewed, 95% felt that the systems should be replaced.

TMG was then engaged to assist the City with the selection of new systems including the creation of a new RFP. This time, 13 vendors responded. After evaluating the proposals against the City’s minimum requirements, 6 vendors remained who were then evaluated across seven categories. 3 vendors were short-listed and invited back for demonstrations. They were Advanced Utility Systems, Hansen USA and PeopleSoft. Advanced emerged as the top solution, but concerns over the technology match with the City’s strategic direction caused the team to move forward with PeopleSoft.

However, the two parties were unable to satisfactorily negotiate the contract. The City decided to pull back and reissue the RFP.

A second RFP was released on August 2003, 18 vendors responded. Following the same evaluation process, 4 solutions were short-listed: thought 2 removed themselves from the competition. Following the demonstration of the two finalists -the Cogsdale system and the Harris system, the City decided to move forward with the Harris NorthStar solution.

Result
As the City desired to have a fixed-cost price for the system, Harris proposed a preliminary gap analysis session to allow them to better fix the prices. This session occurred in July 2004 and resulted in the Statement of Work. The contract was executed in September 2004 and the system went live in August 2005.