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Orange County Page 4 <br />Needs Assessment Project <br />YI. MAJOR ISSi7ES <br />During the course of our assessment we identified four (4) major issues that need to be addressed <br />by the County to insure that its current and future needs will be fully satisfied. These areas of <br />concern are (1) lack of system integration, (2) antiquated technology, (3) missing functionality, <br />and (4) insufficient reporting capabilities. Each of these issues is manifested in a number of <br />smaller, but significant, problems that the County is currently facing. A representative listing of <br />these problems is detailed in Appendix A of this report. <br />A. Lack of system integration <br />The County's legacy financial systems are not integrated which prohibits the sharing of <br />common and complementary information. As a reminder the legacy business system is <br />comprised of the following functions: <br />• General Ledger <br />• Accounts Payable <br />• Payroll <br />• ,Purchasing <br />• Budgeting <br />• Personnel <br />• Fixed Assets <br />The lack of system integration significantly reduces operational efficiency and can result <br />in keying errors and omitted information. Integrated systems share a common database <br />that allows different applications. access to the same information, within security <br />protocols. This eliminates the need for maintaining identical information in separate <br />systems. <br />Example: Purchase order information is currently keyed into the system initially by <br />either the Purchasing department or the requesting department. Then, when a payment <br />request is issued for this purchase order, much of the same information is entered into the <br />Accounts Payable system. This duplication of:effort often results in keying errors that <br />cause additional processing efforts and .delayed vendor payments. Nonpayment and late <br />payment of vendor invoices can adversely affect the perception of the County's business <br />partners. <br />B. Antiquated Software Applications <br />The current financial systems were constructed in the .late 197U's, utilizing the available <br />technology. Extensive programming to these systems has occurred over the years to add <br />needed functianality as requested. However, due to technology limitations within the <br />software, many important requests were abandoned or the programming resulted in <br />limited functionality. Additionally, these legacy systems require greater staffing for <br />support than off-the-shelf commercial systems. This is due to the static nature of <br />