Many jurisdictions are looking to modernize their Enterprise Resource Planning systems. In the meantime, some departments have looked for workarounds for interoperability. Los Angeles County’s Department of Parks and Recreation is doing just that.
The project, which could put plans and permits at an employee’s fingertips, should be complete by January, according to Mohammed Al Rawi, chief information officer for the parks department.
“You need to look at this as a multi-tier application system,” Al Rawi told Techwire.
L.A. County’s ERP system includes human resources and procurement processes.
“Some departments — not all departments, because it’s not mandated — they use it for inventory and asset planning,” Al Rawi said.
While the county’s auditor is responsible for the ERP system, the Parks and Recreation Department is responsible for managing its own documents and creating interoperability between systems.
The ERP system, created by CGI Advantage, is not fully interoperable.
“We can’t integrate the ERP with everything, but we can integrate with a number of things,” Al Rawi said. “We have this centralized system that every department is mandated to use for procurement processes.”
The department wants to use one Web-based system to streamline business processes and document management, instead of requiring employees to log into multiple systems.
“That’s our ultimate goal: Make IT less complicated. If the employee needs to log the same type of work into two or three systems, it should be done on one, and people like me should be able to smooth things out on the back end to save staff time and resources,” Al Rawi said.
The department is in the discovery stage to create a SharePoint online dashboard, based on the county’s Office 365 license agreement. It will work with at least two other dashboards to interface with the ERP and document management system in the background.
“We’re moving from paper-centric operations to all-digital, zero-paper operations,” Al Rawi said.
This would take the administration department down from 10 million documents to zero by digitizing, indexing and tying documents to relevant systems.
Other county systems that could modernize their take on the ERP system include the Department of Human Resources and the auditor's office, according to Al Rawi.
