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FPARS Project – The Financial Planning Analysis and Reporting System (FPARS) Project: Costs and Benefits

Presented to the Government Management Committee 01-Nov-2013 [9555]

• Report and Appendix 1 from the Deputy City Manager and Chief Financial Officer on The Financial Planning Analysis and Reporting System (FPARS) Project: Costs and Benefits

Commentary:

Look at Table 5 for Budget details

Table 6 for project sustainment costs

Words using the word public - page 25 Strategic Benefits With the investment in this project, FPARS will: Make Toronto a leader in multi-year service and financial planning and budgeting by linking Mayor and Council priorities to outcomes; manage financial pressures through priorities; build service-based, multi-year plan with defined targets and service objectives and provide a long term view of the City's service delivery plan. Transform to a service based, performance-driven City with clean financial and performance information organized by service to improve planning, budgeting, budget monitoring and performance reporting. This will allow for more accuracy and effectiveness in determining service costs, track cost-savings, evaluate performance, prioritize services and service levels over a multi-year time horizon. Establish a full inventory of City services that will provide the basis for organizing information on services that will provide answers to questions such as: ? Who provides services? ? What services does the City Provide? ? Why does the City provide these services? ? What is the value of these services ? How much do these services cost? Provide better information in a timely manner; thus enabling Council and the public to discuss and determine levels of service. Provide regular performance reporting on City services, objectives and targets, and a Report Card to Council and the public to demonstrate extent to which objectives have been achieved. Improve accountability and transparency to the public regarding City services; thus fostering public trust in City government by offering better public access through the City's website, to budgets and related information such as the value of services and the resources allocated to those services. Establishing SAP as the system of record will replace “shadow systems/tools” and allow for more efficiencies and cost savings by rationalizing all independently-managed, decentralized divisional “shadow systems” and the burden of duplicate entry and manual processes. Allow other technology initiatives and City Agencies to leverage the system functionality in the future using the SAP Portal. Align with eCity vision of "Local Government, Anywhere and Anytime" and the 311 Vision of "Toronto at Your Service" and the newly adopted service strategy.

Take from Page 28 onwards:

Organizational Benefits Organizational benefits to be realized from the FPARS project relate to processes, reporting, and technology recognizing the integration between these categories. A. Processes Implementing the infrastructure for the Integrated Planning and Performance framework with a focus on connecting Strategic Planning with Service Planning and Multi-year Budgeting will allow the City to better manage its resources and the services delivered. =These will reduce the risk of inconsistent data, transcription/conversion errors, timing difference and reconciliation errors, and provide better information in a more efficient manner for service planning and service delivery.= Efficiencies and cost savings will be achieved through process reengineering; that will reduce manual effort and eliminate duplicate processes; thus allowing staff to focus more effort on service delivery and management oversight and control. The benefits to be provided by these processes include: Improve/standardize information -= PBF as the single point of entry for budget information has reduced duplication of efforts, improve accuracy of data and allow for real time analysis of budget information.= o One system of record replaces potentially 140 plus "shadow" systems/tools. o In 2014, the budget system Debudas used by Cluster A was not used for the 2014 Budget process and the Financial Planning Division's Issue Tracking System was decommissioned. Automatic rollover of future year annualized budget estimates, thus reducing manual effort in budgeting the following year. Reduction in turnaround time of end-to-end process User fee pricing reported for rate increases over a three year period. Manual effort reduced for business cases. Projections for salaries and benefits for multi year (3 years). Forecast and submit personnel expenditure (salary and benefits) thus reducing the time effort involved in completing manual forms. o Allows for consistent approach to budgeting for salaries and benefits in 2014 resulting in $5.646 million in savings. Integrated complement planning and management process (budget, position, employees), including Organizational Change Approval process will be streamlined and automated. o One system of record replaces potentially 136 plus "Shadow" system/tools o Vacancy Management With introduction of Management Self Service (MSS)-after 2014, a more streamlined and automated end to end complement planning and management process will provide more accurate and timely information and will require less staff time administering processes that can be redirected to service delivery.

Access to salary/position/budget information which will be leveraged during collective bargaining for costing models Payroll Time reporting process improvements Utilizing FPARS changes as a first step to enhancing functionality through other PPEB projects - ESS/MSS phase 2, TAMS. The FPARS technology needed to be in place first, so that we could take the next step in automating processes and changing technologies. Cost centre Re-alignment to service view Financial controls/accounts payable/accounts receivable/purchasing controls These processes currently demand time, effort and systems to execute the process. As with any process being re-engineered, it requires time to be stabilized and matured. These processes will have strong corporate oversight and provide capability to provide information on a service-based is being leveraged across the City in decision making involving cross divisional initiatives. B. Reporting Currently reporting from SAP is not user-friendly, requires expert resources for new reports, and is limited to reporting in 2 dimensions – typically costs centres and cost elements. With FPARS, once fully functioning, the City will be implementing SAP?s Business Warehouse and will have Business Intelligence tools which will allow for: financial reporting that is much more flexible and user-friendly; users to include additional dimensions viewing of reports and analyze information with little expert assistance. This additional reporting is critical to enable staff to manage under both the organization structure and service views. It is also critical for a single source of relevant information for financial reporting, performance management and benchmarking. Although we are not able to quantify the benefits received from additional reporting, it will clearly result in faster and better analysis capability at the Divisional and Corporate levels. New analytics and reporting capability for financial, complement and performance information will have the following improvements: Business Intelligence will allow for Dashboards to be created. Analyst notes and budget book will leverage the reporting functionalities Service costing and performance information will be combined with variance reporting More time spent on analysis instead of consolidating of data. Ability to do analytics, predictive modelling, more timely and accurate data.

Finally Employee Self Service Phase 1 will involve rolling out of pay advice notices and T4's to non-union staff and elected officials via the employee portal (ESS)

C. Technology The role of IT is to be an enabler for projects and business the experience gained with the implementation of FPARS has provided IT new skills that will be leveraged for other projects. The FPARS project and the Landscape project have emphasized the need for the SAP revitalization and the opportunity to allowing the city to bring the aging SAP environment to current state.

A number of new SAP Technologies have been implemented alongside the FPARS project.= Many of the tool sets will be and can be used by other SAP and Non-SAP projects. The Knowledge gained by City Staff, through this experience will provide the City the skill sets necessary to be able to have efficient utilization of the Technologies. Some of the benefits realized due to the FPARS project are:

Subsequently projects utilizing these tools will be able to reduce time and effort to deployment. The launch time required should reduce the effort for the project teams to learn the skills necessary. The scripts developed during the FPARS implementation maybe utilized/leveraged for other projects. The Data Governance Model and Data Plan will help IT better manage the needs for how information will be kept and made available for business utilization. The FPARS project has helped IT identify it's programs and services to better manage its resources. FPARS has expanded the use of SAP in the organization; this will assist in furthering the goal of have the city move towards a common system The experience gained by the project teams on the nuances of SAP and the capabilities of the tools with help the City avoids similar challenges.


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