The City of Columbus elevates finance, purchasing, commerce, and budget planning with Dynamics 365

The City of Columbus is the capital of Ohio and the 14th largest city in the United States. The City operates a wide variety of services, including police and fire, public health, utilities, education, and the City’s famous collection of municipal parks.

They chose Microsoft Dynamics 365 to help them meet the challenges of their modern, growing city. Dynamics 365 solutions are flexible and easy to adapt and customize with Microsoft Power Platform to meet the City’s specific needs. A custom portal created with Power Pages and integrated with Dynamics 365 serves as a vendor portal for vendor registration and onboarding. This portal provides the public with access to view requests for quotations issued by the City. For bidding and other procurement activities, they use the Dynamics 365 vendor portal, which is only accessible to registered vendors.

The City uses Dynamics 365 for financial accounting and budgeting to manage financial resources effectively, following public sector accounting guidelines. They also use point-of-sale (POS) terminals to receive payments for multiple sources of income and procure-to-pay capabilities, including workflow and a specialized sealed bidding process.

Before Dynamics 365

Previously, the City of Columbus used Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 with independent software vendor (ISV) solutions for cashiering and public sector functionality. The City was facing challenges with overall system performance and response time—especially in areas of reporting and system inquiry. The solution was highly dependent on a collection of ISV solutions and customizations. Moreover, the solution wasn’t meeting modern needs: for example, employees working remotely because of COVID-19 safety precautions needed to use a VPN to access the City’s network, making it cumbersome to do any work outside the office.

As the City embarked on their efforts to migrate to Dynamics 365, project goals included:

Reduce dependence on ISV solutions and customizations by using out-of-the-box Dynamics 365 public sector functionality for maximum operational efficiency.
Improve availability and reduce downtime by moving to the Microsoft Cloud.
Enable remote workers to easily access the system.
Create a vendor portal to improve the vendor user experience, and a public portal for promoting transparency in the bidding process.
Support vendor collaboration and the vendor request for quotation (RFQ) process, including sealed bidding.
Expand and revamp integration capabilities, including—but not limited to—automation of existing manual interfaces, and exposing data entities and web services as applicable for data extractions.

The Dynamics 365 solution

The City’s solution is based on Dynamics 365 Finance and uses elements of Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management and Commerce applications in addition to Microsoft Power Platform. Here are some of the highlights of how Dynamics 365 and Power Platform are solving the City’s business needs:

Public sector budgeting and accounting: For a city, the level of scrutiny on every dollar collected and every dollar spent is high. Financial planning, budgeting, and accounting need to be fully transparent and traceable. Microsoft’s public sector solution meets those requirements and enables the ability to scale. Currently, the City maintains over 150 budget plans and 9,000 forecast positions, and more than 3,500 grants and capital projects. Many of these processes use workflows with multiple levels of approval, adding to the complexity. With Dynamics 365, the City can easily and flexibly maintain, manage, and adjust those process flows as their needs change.
Cashiering solution: Faced with the challenge of replacing their current cashiering solution, which is used to accept payments for various city services from residents and businesses, the City of Columbus worked closely with their implementation partner, OnActuate, to extend Dynamics 365 Commerce POS to meet their public sector needs. Public Health, Public Services, Public Utilities, Support Services, the Fire division, and the City Treasurer currently accept payments through Dynamics 365 Commerce POS terminals and then the payments are approved and posted in Dynamics 365 Commerce. The City also uses a check-scanning integration tool to scan and store check images virtually. An additional area that the City uses extensively is their Cashiering Financials workspace. This workspace acts as a centralized dashboard for all cashiering activities and provides a visual representation of items that need immediate attention, such as rejected statements.

Figure 1: Cashiering Financials workspace

Vendor collaboration:

Vendor portal: The City of Columbus, as a public entity, needed a public-facing portal where vendors and residents can view all RFQ opportunities currently open with the City without first authenticating. This portal, created with Power Pages, provides access to view open and closed RFQs. In addition, the portal also allows vendors to register as a supplier with the City of Columbus, including registering for procurement categories in which they conduct business. After registration is approved, anytime the City issues an RFQ for a category the vendor has registered for, they’ll receive email notification that an opportunity has been posted that might be of interest to them.
Vendor collaboration: The City previously used the Dynamics AX 2012 vendor portal, which was deprecated and replaced with vendor collaboration in Dynamics 365. The City extended vendor collaboration to offer additional features to vendors. With an authenticated account, vendors can view and update vendor information, view and complete a required contract compliance questionnaire, view invoices and payments, view purchase order confirmations, and submit bids for open RFQs.
Sealed bidding: Sealed bidding functionality is a requirement for many in the public sector. The City of Columbus uses sealed bidding to safeguard the bidding process. When vendors submit bids, the details of the bid aren’t viewable until the bid is officially unsealed. With the use of this capability, supplier pricing information and supporting attachments are only viewable by the supplier themselves until the bid expires and the supplier’s bid is unsealed. This helps ensure a fair and equitable bidding process.

The Implementation

The City of Columbus created an aggressive project plan to complete the migration to Dynamics 365 in about a year. Months after launching the project, COVID and mass lockdowns swept the nation. With lockdowns, city resources shifted their focus to battling the pandemic and performing critical services for City of Columbus constituents, so the implementation had to take a back seat. The implementation timeframe was extended, and the City ultimately decided to delay the project until January 2021, due not only to the impact of the pandemic but also the added additional scope—mainly Dynamics 365 Commerce point of sale—to their overall project plan.

Impact and benefits

Going live during a global pandemic has been challenging, but some of the impact and benefits from Dynamics 365 became immediately apparent. The City of Columbus has already been able to recognize some of the value they expected with Dynamics 365:

Increased productivity for remote employees: Employees can access the system from anywhere, without VPN, increasing productivity and strengthening disaster recovery. These capabilities were tried and tested during the COVID-19 pandemic, as lockdowns took hold and city employees were forced to work from home. The ability to access and interact with systems just like they do at the office helped the City remain productive and continue to service the needs of Columbus residents.
Less effort for better budget planning: With Dynamics 365 the City has enhanced the budgeting process for around 60 users engaged in budget planning. The intuitive, easy-to-use interface looks and feels like Excel, and has allowed users to reduce time and effort spent on budget modeling and maintenance. With up-to-date budget information, a set of Power BI reports with views of budget data are used to review and validate budgets as the team moves through the budget cycle. Overall, the city has reduced their budget planning effort by more than 10 percent.

Vendor collaboration: The new portal is tremendously improved from the old portal. It’s user-friendly and intuitive. The vendor registration process is simple for vendors and now includes key activities such as contract compliance, streamlining the overall process by eliminating manual approvals, offline documentation requests and checks after the fact. Vendors receive automated notifications when RFQs are issued. This creates time-saving and efficiencies across the process. Automation means that the City can entertain a diverse vendor population and onboard them to the system accurately and efficiently. For sealed bidding, vendors are now able to upload supporting documentation for their bids directly into the system, even with large attachments, and these bids are sealed until the appropriate date. The City’s Vendor Services portal, built by using Power Pages, contains a complete catalog of RFQs. The catalog is available to potential vendors and constituents, providing transparency to all. By making onboarding easy, RFQs are easy to find and available for any potential vendor. The City has completed more than 5,000 RFQs in the past year.
Cashiering: The cashiering solution, based on Dynamics 365 Commerce POS, provides all the details that comprise each and every cash receipt. This allows the City to record and report what they’re selling the most of—be it birth certificates, death certificates, car seat inspections, or any number of other city services or fees—and the end-of-day closing process ensures that all funds are accounted for.
Reliable, available, evergreen platform: With Dynamics 365 One Version service updates, the City improves system availability and reduces downtime. Deployments are simpler and quicker, delivering the ability to enable new features and updates with minimal risk. The evergreen methodology allows the City to be on the latest version, all the time.

Solution architecture

The City’s goal is to make it easy for vendors to locate and participate in procurement opportunities while ensuring that the City receives high-quality goods and services at the best price and quality. For this, the City created a portal that lets vendors find procurement opportunities, submit bids, and manage vendor information. The portal is publicly available, and all information is fully transparent to all potential bidders—in addition to citizens. Figures 2 and 3 show snapshots of the portal.

Figure 2: Snapshot of the vendor portal

Figure 3: Snapshot of opportunities listed in the vendor portal

Vendors can use the Vendor Services portal, to seamlessly access information in Microsoft Dataverse and Dynamics 365. Integrating these systems and data enables the automation and user experience behind the City’s portal and supports the needs of vendors and citizens. Figure 4 shows an overview of the solution.

Figure 4. Diagram of the solution integration

What’s next

Expand the use of Power BI with public sector elements such as general budget reservations.
Expand the use of the Dynamics 365 Commerce POS cashiering solution in additional departments.
Create a Transparency Spending portal for City of Columbus constituents using Power Pages.
Automate the processing of vendor invoices by using AI and the automation capabilities in Dynamics 365.

“We’re now thinking about and predicting future needs—how people will be interacting with the city, how to work with vendors most efficiently, and how to use AI and cloud-based applications to optimize those relationships. The Dynamics 365 platform is a critical part of this transformation.”

Megan Kilgore, Auditor, City of Columbus