PeopleSoft Upgrade and Oracle PBCS Cloud for Sonoma County, CA
About the client
Sonoma County is located at the threshold between the commerce-driven San Francisco Bay Area and the spectacular beauty of northern California. The County extends over 1,500 square miles with a diverse economy that includes a world-class wine region, stunning natural resources, and dozens of tourist destinations. Sonoma County government has a history of providing excellent and responsive public service while operating under sound fiscal principles.
Client Challenge
The client wanted to adopt and implement modernization plans that improve IT resiliency across critical business systems. They were looking for an IT services partner who can provide technical upgrade consultancy, end-to-end migration, and ongoing application maintenance support.
Introduction
The County of Sonoma is comprised of 26 departments and agencies that provide a full range of services to the community. In 2015, the County wanted to retain a professional services firm to enable a diversified skill of application managed services for PeopleSoft. CherryRoad was retained by the County as that firm. Subsequently the County issued an upgrade RFP for their PeopleSoft modules that included General Ledger, Purchasing, eProcurement, Accounts Payable, Fixed Assets, and Workflow. CherryRoad was selected as the implementation partner for the PeopleSoft upgrade. After the PeopleSoft upgrade, the County explored options for Hyperion. In 2020, the County selected Oracle’s Public Sector Budgeting Cloud Service. The upgrade / implementation was highly successful and marked a significant point in time as the County moved a critical workload to the Cloud.
The CherryRoad Solution
CherryRoad performed Application Managed Services for Sonoma County in support of the County’s implementation of PeopleSoft Financials, and Budgeting modules.  In addition to that work, CherryRoad partnered with the County to upgrade the PeopleSoft Financials modules from version 9.1 to 9.2. The project included four weeks of post-production support.
CherryRoad partnered with the County to achieve the following goals as part of the upgrade project.
- Completed the scope of the project on time and within budget
- Included detailed knowledge transfer both functional and technical
- Replaced customizations with standard functionality to the extent that it meets the County’s requirements
- Conducted comprehensive testing to avoid lengthy post-production support
- Utilized County resources and develop schedules for the County to support 9.1 production duties
- Elimination of weekend work and overtime hours of County staff
In 2020, as part of a modernization strategy, Sonoma County partnered with CherryRoad to implement and integrate their largest, to date, enterprise-wide application into the Cloud. Recognizing that flexibility and transparency in the planning and budgeting processes across the enterprise are key to the execution of next phase strategic business initiatives, Sonoma County successfully migrated their on-premise Hyperion workload to Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service (PBCS).
CherryRoad ensured smooth migration to Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service (PBCS) and undertook these tasks:
- Created the new Oracle Cloud Planning application
- Extracted and loaded the objects and data from the existing on-premise solution
- Reviewed the existing objects for cloud improvements
- Created the data and metadata interfaces as needed
- Configured user security
- Tested the Solution (Application and Data)
- Prepared the system for Go-Live
Client Benefit
Partnering with CherryRoad, the PBCS project took just 12 weeks and laid the foundation for Sonoma County to continue to automate complex processes and increase efficiency in their budget development process.
CherryRoad helped the county prioritize technology infrastructure modernization projects that directly relate to mitigating risks for points of failure that affect accessibility and scalability of critical business systems.
In addition to the improved set of tools offered by Oracle, Sonoma County has been able to ensure seamless business continuity despite rolling power outages, several wildfire events, and a global pandemic.
Erick Roeser, the Sonoma County Auditor-Controller-Treasurer-Tax Collector said, “Sonoma County strives for excellence in financial management and we are proud to work with CherryRoad. They are a leading Oracle implementer specializing in the public sector and the entire CherryRoad team is dedicated to our success.â€
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“We are excited about implementing the Oracle Cloud EPM planning and budgeting solution,†said Blane Jolliff, Sonoma County, Enterprise Financial System Manager. “It’s imperative for us, as a local government, to implement solutions that are transparent, representative of best practices, and affordable. Because the Oracle Cloud EPM is scalable and highly customizable, it works for our organization and is really limited only by what we can imagine. Oracle Cloud EPM also represents an important transition from an on-premises system to the Cloud. We here in Sonoma County, unfortunately, know first-hand how important it is to have a robust and cost-effective disaster recovery plan. In addition to the improved set of tools offered by Oracle, we have already been able to ensure seamless continuity of business despite rolling power outages, several wildfire events and a global pandemic.”