After many years of a start and stop process searching for a commercial product to fit the needs of Maricopa, a cross-functional and cross-departmental team was formed to put together the pieces of a system specific to the needs of Maricopa. A Steering Team and a Project Team were formed and meetings were held in June 1999 to determine the requirements for building the new system.

PeopleTools was selected to assure a similar user interface to other enterprise applications, and to easily leverage the information in Human Resource Management System (HRMS) including workflow. The team began building the foundation of the new system in August 1999 and is hoping that phase one of the new system will go-live during summer 2000 for use in developing the FY2001-2002 budget. Significant testing still is underway to determine the feasibility of going live during the summer.

Phase one will allow the same level of budget development functionality that existed in the legacy system. It has improved report writing capability and some improvements in functionality and removed the need to develop budgets using the old account code structure. Phase two will enhance the core system constructed in Phase one and enhance the interfaces between BDS and HRMS. Additionally, an upgrade to PeopleTools version 8.0 is expected which will allow the conversion of the application to a web interface. Finally, phase two may include a budget request and planning module which ties budget requests to board and college goals, and could open the system up to several hundred web based users.

More detailed information about the Budget Development System at Maricopa during the 1999-2000 fiscal year is available. The Budget Development System project has a website as well. Monthly status reports about the BDS project are available from the ITS Status Report System.