The North Central Texas Council of Governments (NCTCOG) has licensed Lawson Software's Financials, Procurement, Human Resources, Reporting, and Budgeting and Planning software suites.

Faced with limited budgets and a costly upgrade for their legacy systems, three NCTCOG member cities -- Arlington, Carrollton and Grand Prairie -- decided to buy and share the same business software. They approached NCTCOG in the summer of 2003 to purchase and host the new applications on their behalf and participated in the vendor selection process.

The three cities selected Lawson and will be the first NCTCOG members to use the applications to enhance customer service and provide greater value to their organizations by streamlining and integrating business processes and improving data access. The hosted software will initially enable them to operate more efficiently while minimizing the costs and risk associated with a major software implementation.

"Less time spent on administrative tasks means more time for direct interaction with our customers," said Tim Barbee, chief information officer for the city of Arlington. "Working with other cities to address our technology needs in a shared services model directly supports that goal -- all for less than the cost of upgrading our existing legacy business systems."

Based in Arlington, Texas, NCTCOG is a voluntary association of government agencies that helps its members plan for common needs, cooperate for mutual benefit and coordinate regional development. The NCTCOG region covers a 16-county metropolitan area surrounding Dallas and Fort Worth.

"It would cost the three participating cities at least 50 percent more to buy and install tier 1 business software such as Lawson's on their own -- a price many could not afford," said Richard Price, director of Research and Information Services, NCTCOG. "By participating in one implementation project rather than three, and by sharing NCTCOG and city staff resources, the cities were able to achieve substantial cost savings. By hosting the Lawson applications for them, NCTCOG offers further cost-efficiencies for participating members by providing disaster recovery services and high-availability systems within current city operating budget limits."

"The ultimate vision of the Shared Services Center is that the benefits will be extended as the service is offered to other entities," said Arlington's Barbee. "Adding customers to the Center benefits everyone. The original cities gain additional economies of scale as new customers are added. And as new customers buy into the Center, they gain some of the same benefits of the original customers, including reduced implementation and ongoing costs via shared operation and maintenance costs."

Another benefit of the shared service model, according to NCTCOG's Price, is the knowledge sharing that occurs as members bring their best people together to address common business issues. Price believes the synergy created by this group problem-resolution process will ultimately lead to long-term cost savings for NCTCOG members based on better planning, adoption of best practices and streamlined processes. The evaluation and adoption of best practices was crucial to the selection process, Price added.

Lawson Consulting Services will provide project management as well as implementation and training services for NCTCOG.

NCTCOG and the Lawson team will begin implementing the Lawson applications this month with the goal of being live on all five suites by January 2006. Lawson and the NCTCOG have partnered with Answerthink to leverage its Best Practices Implementation (BPI) approach and tools to directly correlate Hackett-certified best practices to configuration decisions in the implementation. The combined project team will use a centralized "war room" in Grand Prairie to manage the process, communicate changes to the cities' employees and oversee training.

NCTCOG's contract also includes Lawson's e-Recruiting and Employee and Manager Self-Service applications, which will allow NCTCOG members to accelerate applicant pre-screening and give employees online access to their own HR information. In addition to improving employee service, the applications will reduce HR staff time spent on transaction processing and allow staff to focus on more strategic activities, such as negotiating benefit plans and evaluating employee compensation.

NCTCOG plans to integrate the Lawson applications with new imaging and check printing software it will implement during the next 12 months. NCTCOG also will integrate a new time entry system for the city of Arlington as well as existing time entry systems at the cities of Carrollton and Grand Prairie.