Government Success: Cass County, ND Moves from Legacy ERP to Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Transparency and Efficiency

Cass County began searching for a modern ERP solution to replace the legacy system. The solution needed to be capable of handling the specifics of public sector accounting and provide an integrated environment. The county prioritized solutions with a successful state and local government implementation track record, and after careful consideration, they selected Microsoft Dynamics 365 (D365) Finance and Supply Chain Management.

"We short-listed a number of vendors," said Robert Wilson, the County Administrator for Cass County. "Microsoft Dynamics 365 was shown to be the product that best fit our needs."

Based on Microsoft’s recommendation, the Cass County team tapped HSO to implement the solution. An award-winning Microsoft partner, HSO has for over two decades been designing, implementing, and supporting business solutions for governments at the state and local level. The HSO team understood the issues faced by state and local governments and the challenges around modernizing their technology platforms, pursuing the goal to achieve value as quickly as possible while mitigating risk and costs.

“As with any transition to a new product, we really needed a lot of guidance to make sure we were getting the most out of the product as we can as well as doing it in the correct fashion, which is where our partner, HSO, has really been a huge part for us,” commented Henderson.

Cass County's IT team had been tasked with maintaining the on-premises AS/400 system for years, including hardware replacements and costly upgrades.

The transition to Microsoft Dynamics 365 in the cloud would relieve them of these burdensome tasks. With the new solution, hardware could be scaled appropriately in the cloud, and upgrades would be automatic. The team would also benefit from high availability, smoother, more reliable backups, better security and disaster recovery, and anytime-anywhere user access for remote work.

The county stipulated that data and processes should flow seamlessly across the platform while providing the county user community a best-of-breed experience.

According to Henderson, "As a goal to modernizing our environment and to better serve our citizens, we started to look at new utilities we could use in our finance office, our billing, and everywhere else."

Ultimately, the implementation was made possible by the collaborative relationship between the HSO and Cass County teams.

“The HSO team is made up of a lot of specialists, and has just been really good about helping us find everything that we need to make the project a success,” said Tami Hansen, Business System Analyst for Cass County.

Added Thomas Soucy, Highway Department Engineer at Cass County: “Learning new things can be hard, and the learning curve can be quite steep. But I do appreciate the staff from HSO actually helping us flatten that learning curve and making the transition process quite seamless.”

In addition to retiring the AS/400 system, Cass County's key objectives were met by engaging in this transformative project:

• Enable process improvement, integration, and automation across financial management which will increase efficiency across the county's operations
• Surface real-time data to stakeholders and facilitate easier decision-making for county executives
• Increase employee retention and attract new talent to work in state-of-the-art systems day to day with processes that make sense
• Provide better service and transparency to the 180,000 county residents
• Leverage the interoperability of the Microsoft platform to continue modernizing beyond this implementation

Soucy has been very happy with the results. "In the past, the process to do a billing would have taken us days. Now we’ll be able to do it in a matter of minutes."

Bob Henderson was also pleased: "One great thing that we get out of this is our workflow piece. As you submit invoices, it automatically fires off to the right location based upon its content or department or any other feature you really want to tie to it. So, everything is fully transparent and tracked."

In addition to those accomplishments, and arguably most importantly, is the county’s improved ability to make smart financial decisions that bolster the public’s confidence in the government that serves them:

“Make no mistake, this is a big investment,” said Wilson. “We’ve done that because we believe it will allow us to make better financial decisions, track those financial decisions better than we had in the past, and allow us to explain those decisions to department heads, commissioners, and the public at large in a way that should give the public great confidence in how their resources are being spent. We have to provide the greatest value to our constituents and our citizens. Microsoft Dynamics 365 can provide that for us.”