Cook County embraced a new ERP solution

Cook County, Ill., decided to develop an enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution; it was not a cake walk for them. They had to struggle while undertaking the project because they were not aware of how it would impact the county’s internal culture.

According to Tom Lynch, CIO at Suffolk University, the county’s major problem is that there are 10 elected officials who have the authority to access the county’s technology. He claimed that the agency’s environment is “highly federated” but said the county board is interested in IT consolidation.

Cook County, Ill., is the second highly populated county in the nation. Cook wants to unify 8 different ERP systems and for that, they needed a solution. They thought of setting up a separate ERP office that comes under the Bureau of Finance which will be taken care by the user community till the end.

According to County press release, IBM was handpicked by Cook County for system integration and managed services for Oracle's E-Business Suite ERP software. The ERP system’s name is Strategic & Tactical Enterprise Processes or STEP; this will create one data source for all important information which can be shared to back office systems.

Toni Preckwinkle, Cook County Board President signed $75 million contract with amendments. This was announced in the month of September. Post this development, the system processed 8 payrolls for not less than 22,000 employees and it also started managing healthcare enrollment since October 1.