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Partners in Innovation
“The customer is always right, but different customers are right about different things,” says computer scientist Paul Graham. At leading technology companies, product, engineering, and design teams partner with forward-thinking customers to build new capabilities that benefit all customers.
When Irvine, CA transitioned to biennial budgeting, it meant a more challenging process. Unfortunately, its software and systems weren’t up to the task. The City had to move quickly to adopt a solution that could support multi-year planning, including five-year rolling workforce cost projections.
OpenGov Budgeting and Planning provided the platform Irvine needed to create multi-year budgets. Irvine provided OpenGov with a forward-looking use case: multi-year workforce planning. Together, they made multi-year workforce planning a reality for all customers.
Reducing Cost-to-Budget
Building a multi-year budget even during the best of circumstances is a rigorous undertaking. With a manual approach, multi-year forecasting had to be done with a download into Excel at the line-item level for 30,000 accounts. “The data download alone would take an entire day,” describes Jonathan Nih, Senior Management Analyst, City of Irvine.
Additionally, each department employed a Budget Coordinator who took around one month to enter all the line-by-line data for the department. With fully-loaded salaries ranging from $75,000 – $150,000, the cost of inefficient workflows amounted to $6,000-12,000 per department.
Population
287,401
Agency Type
City
Annual Budget
$206,799,774
Role
Finance
Region
West
Solution
Budgeting & Planning
Customer Results
$6-12k saved in manual work hours per department
Much easier multi-year budget development
Improved budget team confidence in projections
Multi-year workforce planning built for no additional cost
With OpenGov, Irvine is able to select the multi-year budget option in the platform and pull in data from the previous cycle. “The OpenGov budgeting module has a clear and intuitive layout that helps when inputting budgets for multiple years,” says Peter Hong, Senior Management Analyst in Public Safety, City of Irvine.
Photo credit: City of Irvine
So What’s the Scenario?
With scenario planning, OpenGov has improved the confidence of the budget team. Scenarios require inputs from across departments, and the process has been reduced to less than a week to complete.
“Running five-year projections is much easier to manage with OpenGov. Our collaborators across departments tell us how much simpler and streamlined the process is for them with a shared platform, and we can forecast with confidence because we have the historical data at our fingertips.”
Jonathan Nih, Senior Management Analyst, City of Irvine, CA
Having a single system for conducting analysis means that there is greater transparency into the analysis and broader understanding of the potential impact of various scenarios.
Partnering on Innovation
Forward-thinking government leaders who take a strategic approach to managing their relationships with mission-critical technology providers see year-over-year functionality improvements that advance their operational priorities.
“Partnering on multi-year workforce planning was a great experience. The OpenGov engineering team catered to us to build a game-changing capability because they saw the benefit to their other customers.”
Jonathan Nih, Senior Management Analyst, City of Irvine, CA
After identifying the opportunity to work with Irvine to build multi-year workforce planning, a leading-edge capability, OpenGov assigned engineers to gather requirements, build mockups, and iterate based on feedback from the customer. “The OpenGov engineers checked in on technical aspects to ensure that what they were building satisfied our needs,” describes Nih.
The benefits were mutual. “It was incredibly useful to our engineering team to have direct feedback from the Irvine team on the usability and design, and their subject matter expertise and collaboration helped us streamline development,” describes Adam Pramono, Senior Product Manager, OpenGov.
About the City of Irvine, CA
Irvine is a planned city in Orange County, California and is known for being among the best in the state for driving/traffic. The City has one of the most educated populations in the U.S. (based on per-capita Ph.Ds) with eight universities and colleges. The largest, University of California Irvine, has an anteater as a mascot and is a top-50 nationally ranked university.
Solution
Budgeting and Planning
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