For City Council Meeting and Rialto Utility Authority [April 23, 2019]
TO: Honorable Mayor and City Council
APPROVAL: Sean Grayson, Interim City Administrator
FROM: Thomas J. Crowley, P.E., Utilities Manager
Title
Request City Council/Rialto Utility Authority Approval of a Final Construction Work Authorization in the Amount of $825,000 for the Customer Information System Replacement and Data Transfer and Conversion Services.
(ACTION)
Body
BACKGROUND:
Rialto Water Services (RWS) is currently utilizing Tyler Technology's Incode Version 9 for utility billing. RWS uses of this system for customer service but the City retains ownership of the system and the data contained in it. The City's Information Technology (IT) staff is responsible for system maintenance and the Rialto Utility Authority (RUA) has paid for technical assistance by Tyler Technology's when needed.
Incode is financial software that was acquired by the City of Rialto in the year 2000 or 2001 and utilizes old COBOL programming language. The utility billing component of the software is a small portion or plug-in module of the larger Financial Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. Although Version 9 of Incode is capable of billing customers for the water and wastewater services they use, it offers little to no customer data management functionality.
The latest version of Incode is Version 10 and it overlaps the utility billing function with another Tyler Technology product, "Munis Utility Billing CIS." With this overlap of functionality and the age of the software, staff anticipates Tyler Technology to discontinue support services for the version of Incode currently utilized by the City and Rialto Water Services (RWS) in the very near future.
ANALYSIS/DISCUSSION:
Due to the restraints in the utility billing software, staff has been researching Customer Information Systems (CIS) and the possibilities of acquiring a system for the utility operations. In terms of restraints, th...
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