About the client

The Colorado Department of Human Services (CDHS) is the principal department of the Colorado state government that operates the state’s social services. It has its headquarters in Denver. CDHS supports people and families by connecting them with assistance, resources, and support at every stage of their lives. They serve Coloradans through bold and innovative health and human services.

Client Challenge

The County Financial Management System (CFMS) was implemented by CDHS in the year 2000 and since then it had undergone minimal upgrades. All the components of this legacy system i.e., application, database and operating system had reached end-of-life and no longer received security updates. The strategic vision of CDHS was to give a facelift to CFMS and make it compatible to the supported versions of all components.

CherryRoad Solution

In July 2018, CDHS engaged CherryRoad to provide application modernization, maintenance, and operational support services for CFMS. In 2019, CherryRoad performed a technical assessment of CFMS components and recommended upgrades to vendor-supported versions of Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) application, Oracle Database, and its Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Operating Systems. CherryRoad was chosen to implement this upgrade project. Additionally, we also performed a hardware migration to virtualized servers and implemented SFTP servers and HTTPS/SSL to secure CFMS user connections.

This project followed a phased approach i.e., 1) Database upgrade; 2) Migration to virtual infrastructure, and 3) Oracle EBS and operating system upgrades.

The production upgrade implementation plan by CherryRoad team was extensive. It contained over 100 steps requiring 72 hours of runtime processing excluding post-upgrade functional and technical configurations. The approved upgrade window was 96 hours. The upgrade was successfully completed according to the implementation plan and all program source files queued during the upgrade were successfully processed within 24 hours of completing the upgrade.

During the pandemic crisis, project progress remained unhindered, as the team leveraged GoToMeeting and MS Teams for stage kick-off and working sessions as well as troubleshooting and demonstrations.

All the upgraded systems successfully went live in May 2021. CherryRoad application support team now takes care of quarterly software patching and update cadence to minimize system vulnerabilities.

Being their application support partner, our focus stays on process improvements such as reporting and reconciliation to connect the dots with heavy customizations.

Business Outcomes

All CFMS hardware/software components were successfully upgraded to supported versions. The highlight of this upgrade is that CDHS systems are now compliant with Governor’s Office of Information Technology (OIT) Security policies. This policy needs CDHS to run on the supported software having capabilities to do security scans, software monitoring, and establish a regular patching schedule.

This system supports a minimum of 600k incoming General Ledger (G/L) transactions monthly and an additional 600k incoming and outbound non-G/L transactions monthly, with the application system uptime of 99.5%.