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The city of Hendersonville is in the far western part of the great state of North Carolina, just south of Asheville. It is a vibrant mountain city where the government and citizens work together for a high quality of life and the City is committed to providing quality, efficient services to all citizens, visitors, and businesses through open communication, timely responses, and quality results. They city’s demographics are at the time go-live were:

Population:            13,000FTE:                      200-300Annual Budget:     $40M-$45M
Situation:
The city found itself at a precarious crossroads of investing in upgrading their Tyler Munis legacy EPM, ERP and HCM system or making the move to a modern, cloud/SaaS based EPM, ERP and HCM system.  They wanted all systems to be on a unified platform, from one vendor for ease of negotiations, simplified support and usability, and seamless integrations of databases.  They viewed this as a 10-year investment, thus they wanted a vendor they could trust.  After an extensive internal review of business practices, gap analysis and rigorous RFP process, below is an outline of their challenges, desired outcomes, their decision and current state of affairs. 
Challenges: 

  1. Maintenance and support were getting expensive. Updates and new versions required additional investments on top of annual maintenance and support.
  2. Functionality was limited.
  3. Cyber-security was becoming more and more of a risk due to ransomware.
  4. Disaster recovery and data backup was getting expensive. 
  5. User interface was old and aging.
  6. Cost of hardware to support application continued to increase.
  7. Staff to maintain infrastructure was getting expensive.
  8. Disparate systems were not integrated thus creating a lot of duplicate entries and manual workflows.
  9. Munis had too many customizations, thus making support and upgrades extremely difficult to manage.

Desired state:Hendersonville wanted a cloud/SaaS based system which could give them the following:

  1.  Modern user interface.
  2.  Government grade cybersecurity
  3.  Offload hardware/infrastructure cost software vendor.
  4.  Built-in disaster recovery.
  5.  Get off the “version wheel”; Pricing to include all updates, new versions.
  6.  A solution that didn’t require any customization.

Decision:Hendersonville chose Oracle Fusion Cloud for EPM, ERP and HCM and FourthSquare as the implementation partner.  The following modules were implemented:
ERP:

  1.  Accounts Payable and Accounts Receivable.
  2. General Ledger.
  3. Cost Management.
  4.  Expenses.
  5. Fixed Assets.
  6. Project Management.

EPM:

  1.  Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud.

HCM:

  1.  Oracle Recruiting Cloud.
  2. Time and Labor.
  3.  Payroll.
  4.  Benefits.
  5.  Core HR/Self-Service portal.
  6.  Absence Management.

Hendersonville is successfully live with all modules.  Further, they utilize FourthSquares’ managed services for both production and development projects.  
Small communities like Hendersonville require modern, best practice functionality, just like larger agencies.  They deserve to not have to settle for sub-par performance and capabilities that many software vendors possess. What they, along with Oracle and FourthSquare, proved with this project, is that small cities, towns and municipalities can afford the very best, tier 1 solution; something that in yester year, was only reserved for the upper echelon of operating income organizations. 

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