About the Client

The Broward Sheriff’s Office (BSO) has nearly 6,000 employees, including more than 2,800 certified deputies and over 600 fire rescue professionals. A full-service, nationally accredited public safety agency, BSO provides full-time law enforcement services 16 Broward cities and towns and in all of Broward’s unincorporated areas, serving more than one-third of the county. In addition, BSO protects the Broward County Courthouse, the Ft. Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport, and areas of the Everglades and the county’s waterways, including Port Everglades.

Client Challenge

To improve payroll reporting and an outdated financial system, and make employee information readily available.

CherryRoad Solution

CherryRoad helped BSO transition from legacy systems, hard copy recordkeeping, and manual billing calculation to a single, consolidated ERP system.

Oracle Titan Award-Winning Project

CherryRoad is proud to be the recipient of the Oracle North America Titan Award for “PeopleSoft Solution of the Year” for our work conducted with Broward Sheriff’s Office. The Oracle Titan Award is given in recognition of an outstanding solution that combines PeopleSoft Enterprise and other specific software products, services, and expertise tailored to a client’s needs. As the only partner chosen from among a record number of nominations in the category, CherryRoad’s excellence in developing and implementing Oracle’s PeopleSoft Enterprise Solutions is recognized by the award.

Selecting PeopleSoft ERP

• Collect time
• Match the time to a customer contract to ensure accurate billing
• Bill the customer
• Accurately compensate the officer according to one of many pay schedules
• Post to Accounts Receivable for collections

With thousands of Special Detail assignments each year, BSO had a clear need for a scalable system that eliminated duplicate entries and provided sufficient reporting to ensure financial integrity. A cost-effective means of managing the thousands of small invoices was critical to the initiative’s success.

Special Detail Billing and Pay

• In addition to serving regularly assigned tours of duty, Broward Sheriff’s Office law enforcement deputies provide extra security for businesses and functions with special assignments, which include both recurring and one-time events. For example, BSO has assigned officers to provide police escort services for large funeral processions, traffic management at the opening of new retail stores and, on a larger scale, event management such as traffic control for major sporting events, including the Super Bowl, Pro Bowl, and Orange Bowl.
• BSO faced significant challenges producing clear, accurate, and timely billing for these revenue-producing assignments, which was a manual process based on triplicate forms that consistently resulted in customer inquiries requiring tedious and time-consuming research. Furthermore, complex payroll rules made it difficult to ensure that officers were accurately compensated for their supplemental time, generating yet more inquiries and research for administrative staff to handle.

Business Process Design

CherryRoad designed the following business processes around the capabilities of the PeopleSoft modules with an Oracle 10g database:

• Utilize Project Costing to track individual assignments and larger customer contracts
• Deploy Contracts to manage annual agreements with customers and eliminate time spent booking against expired agreements
• Implement Time and Labor to feed Project Costing with officer time according to the contract and enable Payroll

Eliminating Manual Billing Calculations

The old system required a deputy to hand-write an invoice on a multi-copy form and give one of the copies to the customer. This method frequently resulted in transposition and math errors when data was manually entered back at the office. In the new system, a project is created upon receipt of an order, with billing automatically generated based on the deputy’s time entry. Manual calculations are eliminated, which has dramatically reduced the number of billing discrepancies as well as the time required to research and resolve them.

Efficiencies Gained

• The PeopleSoft Payroll system offers many rules for a broad range of situations, and has each deputy’s compensation tied to the appropriate rule. Now, the deputy no longer needs to know which set of rules applies to his/her duty on a given day. Pay is accurate and timely, and directly matched to the work billed to the client.
• The software’s audit and report, tracking, and inquiry management capabilities enable reports from Project Costing to provide detail on each transaction, including the specific hours on duty, date, contract, and invoice amount. Consolidating this information in one report greatly simplifies customer inquiry resolution, saving thousands of hours yearly.
• Eliminating two manual entries post-engagement simplified the correlation of work to bill. Previously, timekeepers entered the deputy’s time against the Special Detail order, while Finance entered the receivable from the paper form mailed in after the engagement. Now, once the project is created in Finance, the timekeeper’s entry kicks off the entire payroll, billing, and tracking process.
• Large public safety organizations struggle with processes to handle one-off assignments such as BSO’s Special Detail. The automated processes delivered by PeopleSoft enable entities like Broward Sheriff’s Office to cut costs while providing a level of revenue assurance that was unattainable with their previous manual approaches.