City of Tampa, Florida

Background

The City of Tampa’s Water, Wastewater, and Solid Waste Departments are responsible for maintenance, billing, credit and collections for water, wastewater, and solid waste services. In addition to these core services, the Water division also operates a consolidated utilities call center handling hundreds of calls per day regarding requests for new services, billing, service times, special pickups, and emergency service. The water, wastewater and solid waste operations employ some 835 people, serving approximately 150,000 residential, commercial, and industrial customers throughout Tampa and parts of Hillsborough County.

City infrastructure includes:

Water Service:
- Residential Accounts – 110,000
- Commercial and Industrial Customers – 16,000
- Reclaim – 25,000
- Meter Devices – 150,000
- Service Requests (work orders) – 50,000+ per year
Wastewater Service
- Residential Accounts – 120,000
- Commercial and Industrial Customers 16,000
- 300 + cooling towers
- Service Requests (work orders) – 50,000+ per year
Solid Waste
- Residential Accounts – 85,000
- Commercial (FEL containers, compactors, roll off) – 8,400
- Bulk Services
- Special Collections
- Service Requests (work orders) – 120,000 per year

The City required replacement of four (4) customer management applications including a new CIS, mobile workforce management (MWM), customer relationship management (CRM) and business intelligence (BI) solution.

Westin developed a software acquisition strategy, system selection, and implementation support services for the successful implementation and operation of modern customer management solutions. Westin crafted the City’s software acquisition strategy that involved clarifying the project’s strategic objectives, performing a CIS market analysis, designing system integrations and support services to be acquired; and clarifying the roles and implementation decision processes. Westin’s selection efforts included process definition, requirements gathering, request for proposal (RFP) development, vendor evaluation, and vendor contract negotiations for the four (4) applications. Westin’s system implementation support services for the new Cayenta CIS solution included project management, test management, change management, and the design and support of interfaces to other systems including the City’s financial, GIS and permitting systems.

Implementation of these modern, integrated customer management applications with effective supporting technologies significantly raised the City’s business maturity, with greatly improved responsiveness to customer demands, streamlined internal business processes, and integrated information access across the City departments.

Issue

The City had a 30 year old legacy CIS system (MSS) that provided billing, financial and service order functions. The systems had become costly to maintain and were limited in their flexibility to accept modifications. Service orders were paper orders hand delivered to the service technicians. The culmination of lack of scalability for growth and obsolete technology had placed the City at risk, most significantly to loss of data which would translate into revenue loss. As such, the City decided to replace the legacy systems to gain more flexible functionality, scalability, and integration capability.

In addition, as the City is experiencing economic growth, the number of customers were growing significantly, adding additional stress on the current CIS system.

Solution

To satisfy the City’s current and future business functionality requirements, the City hired Westin to develop, coordinate and manage the selection, implementation and post implementation support of a state-of-the-art commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) solutions for their Customer Information System (CIS), mobile workforce management (MWM), customer relationship management (CRM) and business intelligence (BI) solution.

Westin’s services included:

Business Needs Assessments– Westin conducted interview workshops across all departments and functional groups to document current “as-is” business processes, organization, and technology situation. Westin performed process assessments to describe gaps between current state and desired “to-be” states to define objectives and improvement opportunities.
Business and Technical Requirements – Westin converted the City’s business goals and objectives into specific strategies to produce the framework for new business processes and systems. The strategic framework formed the basis for requirements for acquisition and implementation of CIS, MWM, CRM and BI, including technical and transition services requirements.
Systems Evaluation & Selection – Westin developed specifications and a request for proposal (RFP) for the new CIS, MWM, CRM, and BI systems, including addressing all vendor questions. Westin also provided consulting and expertise in evaluating vendor proposals, developing scripts and facilitating vendor demonstrations, conducting selection workshops, and assisting with contract negotiations.
Implementation Management– Westin provided oversight and quality assurance during the implementations of the new software systems (i.e. CIS, mobile workforce management (MWM), customer relationship management (CRM) and business intelligence (BI) solution). The CIS Systems implementation included integration between the new systems and the existing Geographic Information System (GIS) as well as the City’s existing permitting system. Westin also performed business process reengineering and provided organization change management services.

Outcomes

At the conclusion of Westin’s engagement with the City, the client expected the following strategic benefits:

Improved business processes that allows the City to care for their customer needs more effectively and proactively.
Expanded customer service across all services offered by the City, including the ability to update and customize rates for water, wastewater, and solid waste customers.
Realtime communication with customers, and empowering customers with usage information to manage demand.
The ability to transition to a paperless mobile workforce system for field customer services.
Reduced manual and duplicate efforts which could be made more efficient with automation.
Real time visibility of the status of work in the field that improves efficiency and customer service.
Easily accessible information and reports for analysis and decision support.
Leveraged investment in existing technology and data systems.
Automation of all integrations of outside applications to CIS.