Tulare County Human Resources Department invests in updated management software, improves functionality and efficiency of workflow
VISALIA – After almost 40 years of using the same human capital management system, Tulare County’s Human Resources and Development Department finally made a change that will help with efficiency throughout the county.
On May 2, the Tulare County Board of Supervisors voted to approve an agreement with Mythics Inc. to provide the county with a new human capital management software and licensing system on behalf of Oracle. Tulare County has used its current human resource management and payroll solution since 1987. The overall cost of the switch is not to exceed $4.6 million. District one supervisor Larry Micari said despite the overall cost, this new agreement will improve functionality and efficiency and should save quite a bit of overall staff time.
“I can say coming up through management, we spent a lot of time fixing errors and researching things that the current system was incapable of doing,” Micari said. “I think we’re gonna save a lot of staff time once we get moving forward. So it’s great to see that we are getting up into the 21st century, so to speak.”
In 2020 the county formed a committee to begin the exploration of a better, more efficient system. Lupe Garza, human resources director said throughout the process of improving their system they sent out a request for proposal (RFP). Of those who responded to the RFP, the county looked into the companies who could demonstrate a focus on the counties most important and complicated processes: scheduling, timekeeping, benefit amount rules and memorandums of understanding (MOUs).
“Oracle was the only vendor to demonstrate that its solution could be configured to handle all of the complex roles and examples provided and was unanimously selected as the winner,” Garza said.
The agreement with Mythics Inc. to provide the software and licensing on behalf of Oracle for an amount not to exceed $3,171,815 from May 2, 2023 through May 2, 2028. Tulare County auditor-controller Cass Cook said this is the shared expenses throughout the total stent of the contract. The additional million is to have Graviton Consulting services provide Oracle software implementation services and support for an amount not to exceed $1,438,820. According to Cook, this is a one time cost. It will be effective May 2 of this year through December 31, 2024.
According to Garza, throughout the past 37 years the current system has become complex, with limited opportunities to upgrade the software interface with other applications. It also makes it difficult to automate critical business processes required to meet growing and evolving needs of the county. This has since resulted in county employees doing what they can, using valuable time to make things work. The county was sure to include all 35 county departments in their decision for a software company.
“[The lack of efficiency] has resulted in a highly complex environment of time intensive manual processes and the accumulation of more than a dozen different financial personnel and timekeeping systems, which are necessary for departments to complete essential functions,” Garza said to the board.
According to Joe Halford, director of Tulare County Information Communication Technology (TCICT), there are several benefits to this new system, one being the software updates. Because it is a cloud based solution, they will get updates quarterly. He also mentioned optimizations and standardizations that provide “more workflow functionality,” and reporting analytics will be improved through this update.
