City of Maryville, TN
Incorporate in 1795, Maryville is a rapidly growing City and home to over 28,000 residents at the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains in Tennessee. With its motto, "People are the Key," City of Maryville ("City") aims to grow for high performance, operational effectiveness, and excellent constituent services to its citizens.
Currently staffed with five (5) professionals, the City’s Information Technology Department is responsible for hardware, software, networking infrastructure, and support technical services to over 300 employees from all City departments and elected officials. As the City continues to grow and the economy keeps flourishing, the City of Maryville felt pressure to keep up with higher service levels expectations while adhering to traditionally shrinking budgets and staffing levels. Additionally, the organization's underlying technology platform had failed to keep pace with industry changes, leaving crucial gaps in functionality and processes that disrupted business operations and service delivery City-wide.
“As you know, many companies are technically strong in all things IT but not every firm can build the relationships necessary to help an organization navigate change. Avero excelled in this aspect. Technically strong, depth of knowledge, and an ability to speak in a language management can understand. They don’t use only industry terms. They took us through some discovery to make sure we got the scope right. This was incredibly important to the overall project. ”
The following items were some of the shortages that the City of Maryville's IT environment endured:
Lack of City-wide electronic document management capabilities and limited utilization of OnBase Workflow capabilities
Significantly unsupported financial ERP and HRMS system
Utility billing system that was four versions behind in upgrades
Lack of time and attendance system to track labor hours City-wide
Absence of automated workflow capabilities for business processes, such as Legislative Management and Administration
Lack of comprehensive fiber optic network management strategy
Incompatibility of Development Services’ permitting and tracking system to the City’s GIS platform as well as a utility billing system
Lack of field mobility and GIS integration
Unavailability of documentation for the City’s network, hardware, software, infrastructure as well as IT policies and procedures
An overall deficiency of leveraged utilization and integration of the implementing applications
The City relied on the consulting experience and services of Avèro Advisors in 2018 to initiate an IT Strategic Planning (ITSP) project that led the City to move forward with prioritized recommendations for IT investment over the next 3 to 5 years. Taking an in-depth look into every angle of the IT environment that had furnished City-wide, Avèro analyzed and made several high-level observations of the critical challenges and opportunities for improvement to mitigate the gaps in functionality and processes. Based on key findings from the current state analysis (at that time), Avèro's team targeted those deficiencies and identified potential improvements for alleviating gaps and system maintenance. Further, Avèro offered IT solutions that provided more exceptional ability to integrate with other systems, aligned technology investments, regional goals, and executive priorities with the City's desired future vision.
Avèro Advisors currently serves as the project manager and has assisted the City of Maryville in administering the implementation of the ITSP as well as fulfilling the following achievements:
Utility Billing System
The City's version of Cayenta was at least four (4) versions behind, lacked several enhanced features offered in the latest version, and could not interface with other systems. In February 2019, the City successfully upgraded the new version of Cayenta after all the essential implementation planning and staff training procedures. The latest upgrade allows the City to seamlessly integrate the system and related processes with its future ERP system, outage management system, and advanced metering infrastructure (AMI). This upgrade will also provide various enhanced features on the customer side, such as reviewing historical usage, past bills, etc., to enhance functionality for staff and citizen-facing portals.
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) System
GEMS, the City's financial ERP (and HRMS) system, lacked workflow and automation for various critical business processes, such as work order management, fleet management, plant accounting, and asset management. Furthermore, vendor support of the current GEMS version ended in 2018, which led the City in an ambiguous direction. Avèro performed Business Process Analysis across many City departments, including Financial Services, Procurement, Human Resources, Development Services, Public Works, Fleet, and Public Utilities. This analysis enabled Avèro to identify current limitations and map out the future (TO-BE) state of critical business processes. In 2020, Avèro successfully guided the City through system requirements definition, RFP development, ERP system evaluation, and selection for various enterprise solutions (Financial, Procurement, Human Resources, Fleet, and Asset Management). Avèro will assist the City through contract negotiations with the selected vendors, Tyler Technologies and CSA, and subsequently provide project management support for these system implementations.
MACnet (Maryville-Alcoa-County Network)
Avèro has aided the City's Electric department with mapping and splicing services for MACnet, a shared fiber-optic network between the City of Maryville, City of Alcoa, and Blount County. Avèro's team currently performs fiber mapping over Maryville & some parts of Blount County and fiber routing and/or risk reduction of the Pershing Academy Learning in Alcoa. Avèro will then maintain and extend MACnet's optical fiber ring to deliver more computing power and enable local government agencies to provide efficient services for better communication, coordination, and planning related to this vital asset at a reasonable cost.
