Enterprise Resource Planning Solution

The vendor required to provide enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, microsoft dynamics GP, is approaching end-of-life and will no longer meet the ongoing operational needs of the organization.
- The county seeks a replacement system that will:
•    Fully support municipal-specific functions, including property tax billing, utility billing, and cash receipting, accounts receivable, accounts payable 
•    Streamline and modernize the budgeting process, 
•    Provide citizen self-service capabilities to improve transparency and access, and 
•    Enhance internal efficiency by reducing manual processes, improving reporting, and supporting integration across departments. 
•    Optionally, fixed assets – including asset retirement obligation.
- Objectives and outcomes
1. Internal outcomes include:
•    Reducing manual processes across finance and administration,
•    Streamlining the budgeting process to improve accuracy and timeliness, and
•    Increasing efficiency and accuracy in property tax billing, utility billing, and cash receipting, and
•    Improving overall staff efficiency through modern workflows and integrated tools.
2. Citizen-facing outcomes include:
•    Providing residents with online access to property tax and utility accounts,
•    Enabling online payment options for greater convenience, and
•    Improving public access to records and related information.
- ERP system scope
1. In‑scope for initial go‑live:
•    Core financials (GL, ap, AR, cash, bank reconciliation)
•    Budgeting and forecasting
•    Purchasing and approvals
•    Property taxation
•    Utilities
•    Fixed assets
2. Stage‑two scope:
•    Citizen and ratepayer portal
3. Out‑of‑scope:
•    None beyond the scope delineated above. 
•    Vendors must treat any additional functionality as optional and price it separately.
4. Required integrations (quote as separate line items):
•    GIS platform – data exchange and mapping integration
•    Camelot (property information) – property data integration
•    Budgeting – integration with Questica (current tool, currently being set up)
•    Cemetery management – integration with current solution
- Current systems and architecture
1. Current core systems:
•    ERP: microsoft dynamics GP with diamond municipal solutions add‑ons
•    Budgeting: Questica (integrated with GP)
•    GIS: in production. 
•    Currently in Esri
•    Cemetery management: external product, separate from GP
2. Hosting, environments and security:
•    Hosting model
•    Identity and SSO and MFA expectations
•    Canadian data residency and privacy requirements
•    Target resilience, recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO)
3. Users and reporting:
•    Estimated user counts (8 full users)
•    Reporting tools in use – management reporter
- Current challenges and limitations
•    E.g., manual processes in ap and bank reconciliation
•    E.g., limited analytics and self‑service
•    E.g., year‑end close effort and audit preparation
•    E.g., training and user adoption
•    E.g., data quality and duplicated entry
- Business drivers for change
•    We are a small organization. We want to make sure the process is not overwhelming, and we are able to transition with minimal headaches
•    Risk reduction and auditability
•    Efficiency and automation (cycle time reductions; paperless processes)
•    Transparency for council and citizens (timely reporting; self‑service)
•    Cloud alignment and predictable total cost of ownership
- Assumptions, constraints, and dependencies
•    Target go‑live window and blackout periods (e.g., taxation and utility billing cycles)
•    Municipality resourcing: SMES for finance, taxation, utilities, GIS
•    Data migration scope (masters and open items and historical years)
•    I.e., how many years of data will we be importing, broken down by module. 
•    Accessibility, language, and privacy requirements.
- Technical requirements
1. Cloud architecture and hosting
•    ERP solution shall be delivered as software-as-a-service (SaaS), fully hosted and managed by the vendor or its cloud partner.
•    All data, backups, and disaster-recovery environments must be hosted entirely within country.
•    The hosting environment shall reside on a tier-1 cloud platform with defined regions and documented failover procedures.
2. Security and privacy
•    All data must be encrypted in transit and at rest (aes-256 or higher).
•    The system shall support role-based access control (RBAC) and maintain complete audit logs exportable to the municipality.
•    The solution must comply with act for the handling of personal information.
3. Identity and access management
•    The solution must integrate with microsoft ENTRA id (azure active directory) or an equivalent identity provider using SAML 2.0 or OpenID connect for single sign-on.
•    Multi-factor authentication (MFA) shall be enforced for all administrative and privileged accounts.
•    Administrators must be able to assign granular permissions by user, role, and department.
4. Data protection, backup, and disaster recovery
•    Provide automated daily backups with configurable retention and restore options.
•    Documented incident-response and breach-notification procedures are required.
5. Interoperability and integrations
•    The system shall support open, standards-based interfaces including rest and json APIs and webhook and event-driven integrations.
•    Preferred integrations include:
o    Provincial property-assessment data import for taxation
o    Canadian banking eft and direct deposit formats for accounts payable, payroll, and pre- authorized payments;
o    Asset-management systems such as citywide for capital-asset and work-order data exchange;
o    Budgeting tools such as quest Ica through import and export or excel integration.
6. Environments and deployment
•    Provide separate production and at least one non-production (test or training) environment.
•    Configuration changes must be transferable between environments. 
•    System upgrades shall be completed with minimal downtime and include a defined rollback plan.
7. Performance and availability
•    The solution must maintain a minimum 99.9 percent monthly uptime, excluding scheduled maintenance windows.
•    Average response times for typical transactions must remain acceptable under normal municipal workloads.
•    The environment must scale to accommodate fiscal-year, payroll, and taxation peaks.
8. Data migration and master data management
•    The vendor shall supply tools or templates to map and load legacy data, including chart of accounts, vendors, customers, employees, and property rolls.
•    Post-migration validation and reconciliation reports shall be provided to confirm data accuracy.
9. Reporting and analytics
•    The system shall include a library of standard financial, payroll, and taxation reports and support ad-hoc report creation by authorized users.
•    Reports must be schedulable and distributable through secure email or portal delivery.
•    Audit trails shall capture user, timestamp, and before and after transaction details.
10. Accessibility and usability
•    All user interfaces must comply with WCAG 2.1 level aa standards for accessibility.
•    The application shall be browser-based, mobile-responsive, and optimized for field and remote users.
11. Configuration and extensibility
•    Core functional requirements shall be met through configuration or supported extensions; no source-code modifications are permitted.
•    All extensions must be upgrade-safe, fully documented, and version-controlled.

- Contract Period/Term: 3 years
- Questions/Inquires Deadline: January 23, 2026