Oracle Customer Study

City of Winnipeg
Business Challenge
The City of Winnipeg wanted to replace its 12-year-old legacy
budgeting application with an integrated new solution that could
support both position and employee budgeting by bringing
together human resources and financial data across its highly
The Customer decentralized organization. The solution also had to provide both
• Industry: Government
a functional and services perspective. Information on the actual
• Geographics: Winnipeg,
costs of public services improves the City’s accountability to
Canada taxpayers.
• Operating Budget: $700
Million in 2004 PeopleSoft Enterprise Solution
• Employees: 8,000 The City of Winnipeg standardized on Oracle’s PeopleSoft
PeopleSoft Enterprise
Enterprise Budgeting 8.8 as the foundation for its new, integrated
Solutions budgeting system. The City is also the first to successfully
• Human Capital Management
implement both position and employee budgeting, and it uses this
functionality to adhere to the various union collective agreements
• Financial Management
governing its 8,000 employees.
• Supply Chain Management
• Enterprise Performance Business Benefits
Management
Budgeting The City of Winnipeg uses PeopleSoft Enterprise Budgeting and
Financial Management functionality to fulfill the following
Implementation Team business requirements:
PeopleSoft Global Services
• Online access to accurate budgeting, human resources, and
Deloitte Consulting
financial data eliminates redundant data entry and ensures a
Customer Service Level consistent, citywide approach.
Standard • Tight integration with PeopleSoft Enterprise Human Capital
Management ensures accurate input of most salaries and
“Our elected officials are judged benefits, the city’s largest budgetary cost.
in terms of the services they
deliver to taxpayers, not on what • Custom reporting enables city employees to access real-time
our departments do. Using financial information in customized formats, improving
PeopleSoft Enterprise Budgeting, budgetary analysis.
we can show taxpayers exactly
how much is being spent on • Multiple views of budget data demonstrate costs on a
critical public services.” functional and/or service basis, improving accountability to
taxpayers.
Bob Gannon
Chief Financial Officer • Integrated system solutions improve the cost-effective
delivery of public services, and support and enhance
eGovernment efforts.

Quantifiable Benefits
• Payback in seven years.
• Net present value benefits of $19 million over 12 years.

Copyright © 2004, 2005 Oracle. All rights reserved. Printed in the U.S.A.
 Oracle Customer Study
A Platform for eGovernment,
and Millions in Savings to Boot
Although an integrated system
and budgetary control are some
of the obvious benefits the City of
Winnipeg is receiving with its new
PeopleSoft Enterprise Budgeting
solution, the real benefits lie with
the vision that Chief Financial
Officer Bob Gannon and his team
have for city government as a
whole.
“eGovernment for us is about
being able to deliver effective
services to our city and having
taxpayers see the City of
Winnipeg as a total organization,
not just separate, unseen
departments,” explains Gannon.
“That is what’s driving us as an
organization. PeopleSoft
Enterprise Budgeting and the
PeopleSoft Enterprise platform in
general are the foundation upon
which we are building our
eGovernment platform.
“Our entire PeopleSoft Enterprise
implementation was business
case driven,” Gannon concludes.
“A positive business case
showed the value of this invest-
ment to our elected officials and
our taxpayers. The business case
showed that the financial pay-
back will occur in about seven
years and that the net present
value benefit will be $19 million
over 12 years.”
Copyright © 2004, 2005 Oracle. All rights reserved. Printed in the U.S.A.
The City of Winnipeg Finds Gold in PeopleSoft Enterprise
Budgeting
When 50 percent of your operating budget is made up of salaries
and benefits, finding a budgeting application able to handle both
position and employee budgeting is not just important, it’s
imperative. So when the City of Winnipeg decided to upgrade its
12-year-old legacy budgeting system, it needed a solution that
could integrate human resources (HR) and payroll data across 15
different departments, track and cost out collective bargaining
agreements with eight different labor unions, and maintain
multiyear budget cycles.
Sound challenging? It was, until PeopleSoft Enterprise Budgeting
8.8 came on the scene. The City of Winnipeg recently became
the first PeopleSoft Enterprise customer to standardize on
PeopleSoft Enterprise Budgeting for position and employee
budgeting, a huge win for city officials and the nearly 700,000
residents living in Manitoba’s capital city.
“Our old budgeting system was not integrated,” explains Bob
Gannon, chief financial officer, City of Winnipeg. “With
PeopleSoft Enterprise Budgeting 8.8, we now have an integrated
platform and common approach to our budgeting process. Now
we can do both position and employee budgeting using source
data from our payroll and HR applications, and that’s a huge win
for us.”
Tapping into the Gold Source
Information is imported into Budgeting directly from the City’s
PeopleSoft Enterprise HR and financial applications, ensuring
data consistency and accuracy.
“To me, salary budgeting must be accurate,” notes Betty Holsten
Boyer, manager of Financial Planning and Review for the City of
Winnipeg. “When you have 50 percent of your overall tax-
supported budget made up of employee costs, you have to
ensure that you’ve got that chunk of the budget accurately
calculated.
“What PeopleSoft Enterprise allows us to do is go into our HR
system and extract all the information on employees, salary
schedules, and pay groups, and bring that directly into the
budgeting module,” Holsten Boyer continues. “We call this our
‘gold source’ of information—a source where all our HR
information resides in one place and is consistent with what is in
our other applications.”
Another way the City of Winnipeg ensures data accuracy in the
budgeting process is to import its chart of accounts from
PeopleSoft Enterprise Financial Management directly into its new
budgeting application. The tight integration between the two
applications ensures that the uploaded information is valid,
thanks to control features like combination edits.
 Oracle Customer Study
Stan Bucko, manager of Financial Applications
for the City of Winnipeg, explains: “When
users add or change financial information on
employee data or line budgets, the budget
system edits the chart of accounts to ensure
that each ChartField is valid in itself and in
combination with other ChartFields. At the end
of the budgeting process, all budgeting
information is uploaded into the general
ledger, where it is used for controlling our
expenditure through commitment control and
for reporting actual to budget.”
Multiple Views Improve Accountability
After its month-end close, the City of Winnipeg
used to run approximately 10 customized
reports to manage its financial expenditures
and to conduct analysis and projections to
year-end. The entire projection process was
dependent on how fast the department could
get its reports and reenter data into its
spreadsheets. This system was frustrating for
City staff and officials.
“Our reporting is much better now,” enthuses
Bucko. “With a faster close and the ability to
produce daily financial reports with drilldown
capability and download capabilities into Excel,
users can see what their financial position is at
any time during the month before, during, and
after the close.
“In addition to the drilldown and download
features, the user also has the ability to view
the financial data at the department, division,
account, or program level, and the ability to
access specific data using query tools. Now
everyone from the corporate controller to the
individual branch supervisor has access to all
the information they want to see,” says Bucko.
Copyright © 2004, 2005 Oracle. All rights reserved. Printed in the U.S.A.
“Another huge benefit is the flexibility we now
have to look at our budgets from both a
service view and functional view,” adds CFO
Gannon. “Using PeopleSoft Enterprise
Budgeting, we can now track the costs of
public services, and that will help us and our
elected officials better determine where to
spend taxpayer monies.”
No More Surprises
The City of Winnipeg is also ensuring
accountability by using features like commit-
ment control in Budgeting 8.8 to control
expenditures between salary and nonsalary
accounts. Controls are enforced at various
levels of the organization, such as branch,
division, or even at the departmental level,
depending on how each department wants to
control its expenditures.
“In the past, departments would overexpend
their budgets and then submit reports to City
Council asking for additional funding,” says
Bucko. “City Council did not like these types
of surprises at the end of the year, and we
needed to stop that from happening. Using
commitment control, we can track expendi-
tures on salaries, control expenditures on non-
salary accounts, and control total salary and
non-salary accounts. So if you exceed your
salary budget, you can dip into your non-salary
discretionary budget, but at the end of the day,
the total budget from your division or branch
can never be exceeded. So no more
surprises.”