City of Tampa partners with Oracle to soar to the cloud

Whether its learning about Cuban cigars in historic Ybor City, catching a hockey game at Amalie Arena in the Channel District, or strolling down the 4.5 miles of picturesque Bayshore Boulevard sidewalk, the City of Tampa has a little something for everyone. Located along Florida’s Gulf Coast, Tampa is a growing urban destination for residents and businesses. In addition to its championship pro football and hockey teams, the city is home to the state’s largest port system, prestigious colleges and universities, and a number of Fortune 500 companies. Tampa also boasts a wide selection of restaurants and cuisines, a thriving arts and culture scene, and of course, plenty of sunshine.

Over the last 15 years, the Tampa Bay area experienced substantial population and infrastructure growth, but the city government’s IT systems were still running on legacy technologies—some of which were shared with the government of Hillsborough County, a separate government entity. In particular, the City of Tampa and Hillsborough County ran their HCM and ERP operations on a shared instance of Oracle E-Business Suite. This shared services scenario made sense when launched more than a decade ago, when enterprise cloud applications were a less viable option, but it had grown inefficient and increasingly problematic.

For instance, the basic task of installing software patches had to be synchronized by the city and county IT teams. If schedules didn’t line up, patches were delayed, and systems remained outdated with potential security risks. What’s more, business processes such as payroll could break down due to the slightest human error, such as a city or county IT employee selecting the wrong allocation on a drop-down menu.

To increase productivity, improve processes, and reduce costs, the City of Tampa needed to move its finance, supply chain, and human resources processes to its own HCM and ERP software in the cloud. The city also wanted to move away from the customizations it had relied on with its old software, which wound up making its operations less effective.

The City of Tampa had developed a trusted partnership with Oracle and chose to stay with the company for its IT overhaul, implementing Oracle Cloud Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Oracle Cloud Human Capital Management (HCM), and Oracle Cloud Supply Chain Management (SCM). The city conducted a study with KPMG to consider all its options, and found that Oracle offered a cost-effective and robust set of cloud services that could be implemented quickly through the Oracle Soar platform and with the close assistance of Oracle Consulting. 

Following Oracle Consulting’s Soar methodology, the City of Tampa went live on Oracle Cloud ERP, HCM, and SCM in 10 months, reducing implementation costs by as much as 30% from the overall migration effort.

Now separated from the county government, the city’s business processes can take advantage of best practices built into the cloud applications rather than introduce customizations. And updates such as software patches and new feature enhancements happen automatically, so the city always has current applications with the latest features.

Tampa’s city government officials now have a complete view of workforce and financial data in the cloud, which has accelerated decision-making, increased efficiency, and reduced costs. Meanwhile, a new and improved employee experience—supported by digital worklists and approval processes—has reduced the time workers spend on manual administrative tasks.

Oracle Cloud HCM has enabled the city to digitize previously manual processes, such as partial period new hire accruals, pensionable and non-pensionable hours and earnings, and employee contributions to union banks and city employee sick banks.

In addition, Oracle Cloud HCM has proved easier to use. The application automatically completes multiple processes that were previously manually managed in payroll. The system also requires less maintenance, as the absence management module completes most accruals, carryover, and deductions automatically with little to no need to change data.

With Oracle Cloud ERP, the city has improved its procurement processes, finding that the system made it easier to create new inventory locations and validate addresses in the supplier database.

During the pandemic, the implementation was completed by an almost entirely virtual team of specialists from Oracle Consulting working closely with the City of Tampa’s IT staff. The virtual component proved to be asset to the migration, as it made meetings easier to attend and made follow up and documentation more efficient.

The city is now able to focus more on serving the community, thanks to improved performance across all applications, continuous updates for security maintenance, and new features.

The City of Tampa partnered with Oracle Consulting for the migration and implementation. Oracle Consulting specialists delivered a rapid migration that was on time and on budget.

This document is not to be considered a recommendation or promotion of services or products.