City of Albuquerque
The City of Albuquerque Streamlines IT to Bring 21st Century Services to Residents
"Ultimately, UC4 has been recognized by our peers at the city as a wise decision. It's a solid choice for now and in the future, and I know we can depend on excellent support for years to come."
Jim Reed, Production Control Administrator
Customer Snapshot
Institution: City of Albuquerque
Business/Industry: Government
Location: Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA
Webpage: www.cabq.gov
Metro Population: about 8 Million
The Institution
Founded in 1706, Albuquerque is the heart of Bernalillo county and home to 750,000 residents in the metropolitan area. Albuquerque's rapid growth has positioned New Mexico as the 12th fastest growing state in the nation.
The Challenge
In 2004 the City of Albuquerque embarked on a major IT initiative to migrate its water utility billing off the mainframe and into Oracle PeopleSoft Enterprise. PeopleSoft was selected for its ability to build jobs with specific parameters. Dedicated employees worked hard to implement a billing system that would protect against errant data and optimize system performance.
When Albuquerque went live with PeopleSoft in 2006, Jim Reed, the city's production control administrator, and his team immediately saw that PeopleSoft's on-board scheduling utility was not robust enough to handle the sophisticated jobs they had designed. They were faced with requesting and submitting each job in their complex chains manually. Seven days a week, they worked in shifts throughout the night – after a full day's work – to ensure that processing completed on time.
"Once we started pushing the limits, we realized Process Scheduler just couldn't do what we needed it to do," said Reed. "We were quickly heading toward a major burnout."
"After spending a year-and-a-half implementing PeopleSoft, Albuquerque was left babysitting the new system. Facing increasing potential for error, processing bottlenecks, slowed revenue collection and tremendous pressure on staff and resources, Albuquerque began its search for an automation solution.
"PeopleSoft is great," said Leroy Llamas, IT operations. "But the Process Scheduler couldn't group specific parts of nightly runs together. We also had problems with complex dependencies and the volume of our jobs."
The Solution
After researching automation solutions and short-listing three, Reed decided that UC4 best fit the city's needs. In less than six weeks, the UC4 platform was implemented and managing Albuquerque's water billing processes. Reed was able to keep the parameters he'd already defined in Process Scheduler and quickly automated the PeopleSoft jobs that were already in place. The city's nightly batches ran quicker, more reliably and without the latency of human intervention.
With the UC4 platform, the city automatically posts payments, generates invoices, distributes output (preparing the actual paper bills) and handles online transactions. The UC4 platform also provides Reed and his team with automatic error notifications.
"Prior to the UC4 platform, it was almost impossible to restart the job stream when an error occurred", said Reed. "The operator would have to physically pick up the phone and notify an on-call employee. Now, the on-call gets a direct page, shortening the resolution cycle."
"I was on-call through November," continued Llamas. "I didn't have to do anything. The built-in holiday calendar worked without problems – the UC4 platform does what we were told it would do.""At this point, I don't even think about our nightly processing because it has become so dependable", said Reed. "Ultimately, the UC4 platform has been recognized by our peers at the city as a wise decision. It's a solid choice for now and in the future, and I know we can depend on excellent support for years to come."
