It’s called SAP, a worldwide platform used by hundreds of thousands of employees to manage billions of dollars in money and other assets. Hiring, promoting or firing an employee? Open SAP. Tracking vendor payments, construction projects, working hours? SAP. Buying a sheriff’s helicopter or a box of paperclips? SAP.
“It’s a master system that runs everything,” said Benjamin Swanekamp, chief of staff to County Executive Mark Poloncarz. “We could not function without it.”
But the version of SAP used by Erie County is highly customized, two decades old and nearing the end of its supported life. Replacing that master software system, which serves as the foundation of the county’s record-keeping bureaucracy, is expected to cost county taxpayers $4.62 million over the next couple of years.
Upgrading the existing user-unfriendly system to a modern, cloud-based system that can take advantage of mobile technology and provide the public easier access to county information is the goal. The change is also a “multiyear, complicated mess,” but it can’t be put off any longer, county officials said.
Why upgrades to one Erie County sewage plant could cost more than $200 million, and who pays
Erie County's Southtowns sewage treatment plant is undergoing its first major expansion in 45 years at a potential cost of more than $200 million. That has implications for certain taxpayers.
Last month, the Erie County Legislature approved spending $650,000 as the first step to upgrading the county’s software system. That represents the first approved payment of what is expected to be a $2 million outlay this year, followed by another $2 million earmarked for next year. In addition, the Personnel Department is slated to receive a related, $625,000 module for employee recordkeeping.
The county began looking at a variety of competing master software suites last year, with prices quoted in the $15 million to $30 million range, said Michael Breeden, who heads the county’s Division of Information and Support Services. But then, SAP came forward and offered to upgrade the county’s outdated SAP system with a new cloud-based version for much less.
“When SAP came to us with this offer,” Swanekamp said, “it was truly a no-brainer.”
Clunky old system
The current SAP system, which the county currently hosts on its own servers on the 15th floor of the Rath Building, was originally customized to mimic the paperwork and bureaucracy under the administration of former County Executive Joel Giambra, Swanekamp said. It is technical and difficult for new employees to learn. And as veteran employees retire, fewer people are left who have a deep understanding of how the system works, he said.
Deal to turn sprawling nursing home property in Alden into a marijuana farm was years in the making
Brothers Ryan and Luke Rich's vision of transforming an abandoned, Erie County-owned nursing home property into one of the most successful marijuana growing and distribution facilities in the state is taking shape.
“There are hundreds of documents that explain, for an end user – a departmental accountant, somebody in Personnel – how to do these, sometimes, very complicated transactions,” he said.
He used the new employee form as an example. Right now, a county administrator has to know the new employee form code, ZHR_F77, to add an employee and move through all the grid steps in an outdated interface, instead of being able to follow plain-language tabs that any employee could pick up more easily.
A newer system will not only make it easier to get new employees trained on the system, but make it easier to monitor the time of personnel who work odd hours and overnight shifts, such as those who work in the parks, police dispatch and Sheriff’s Office, officials said.
In addition, a more modern system means employees will have access to mobile applications and may open up access to county data to members of the public, which is harder to do now, Breeden said.
First steps
A 'brutal' stretch of lawsuits, settlements and trials is costing Erie County millions of dollars
The $4.5 million figure does not count additional, undistributed settlements from last year and multimillion-dollar civil judgments the county is still trying to fight on appeal.
Before any major transition can begin moving forward, however, clean-up work had to be done.
Every business vendor that works with Erie County has its own code number. But over the years, county employees have inadvertently created outdated and duplicated vendor codes.
So, instead of Erie County having hundreds of these, or even hundreds of thousands of these, the county had 22 million of them, Breeden said. It isn’t possible to transfer over so many codes, so the county had to spend a lot of time in-house slashing the number of vendor codes to a more reasonable number.
With that clean-up work concluding, the county is now prepared to spend $650,000 to work with a migration specialist that will get SAP’s general ledger software up and running for the county’s financial accounts. That should take until December or January, Breeden said.
Once that work is done, the county will solicit proposals to get the rest of the SAP system migrated over. That work will be undertaken in phases, so it is less disruptive to county work, he said. The rest of the migration is expected to take another 8-to-12 months.
If all goes as planned, Breeden said, the full conversion should be completed by the end of next year or January of 2027.
© 2025 The Buffalo News (Buffalo, N.Y.). Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
