Tumwater committee endorses additional spending to connect ERP system with the cloud 

The City of Tumwater plans to spend an additional $150,000 annually to connect its enterprise resource planning platform (ERP) to the cloud. 

The Tumwater Budget and Finance Committee endorsed the additional costs at a meeting on Friday, Sept. 26, by amending a contract with its ERP service provider. 

The city has been using a Tyler Technologies Munis system since 2021 to manage finance, human resources and payroll. 

Tumwater Information Technology Project Manager Matthew Ames said staff have been in discussion with the firm about the cloud upgrade for the past two years before coming to the committee with the contract amendment. 

The city currently pays $182,347 every year in subscription fees for its ERP system. To migrate to the cloud, the city would have to pay $334,000 annually. 

Ames said moving to the Tyler Technologies cloud service, which is hosted on Amazon, would make the city’s ERP platform more resilient, reduce information technology infrastructure costs, as well as provide access to additional features not available with the on-premise version. 

He added Tyler Technologies is also developing artificial intelligence tools to help staff work more efficiently, including natural language features so staff can more easily interact with the ERP system. 

Ames said transferring to the cloud now rather than later would be more efficient.

“If we delay longer, we're going to be going through more and more data, and it's going to require more staff time to review,” Ames said. 

Additionally, the city plans to integrate utility bill payments to the ERP system. Migrating now, while not yet connected, would prevent a one day to four day outage, which would prevent customers from being able to pay bills. 

With the committee's endorsement, the contract amendment is being forwarded to the city council, which will consider it for approval on Oct. 7 as part of its consent agenda. 

Once the amendment is approved, Ames said the migration should take four to six months.  

He added that three to six months would be needed to inform the public about the changes to bill payments.

Afterward, the city also intends to integrate permits, inspections and asset management into the ERP system, which would require two years to complete.