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City Selects Agresso Business World over Industry Leaders with $1 Million Deal VICTORIA, B.C. (Dec. 5, 2007) – Agresso, (www.agresso.com/USA), the ERP market’s definition of agility, has announced that the City of San Buenaventura (Ventura), California will replace its back-office software systems with a city-wide implementation of Agresso Business World applications. The agreement is valued at approximately $1 million and continues Agresso’s success against several ERP industry “giants” who competed on the deal. The upgrade and installation of software will help the city in its efforts to upgrade and modernize internal and customer-centric government processes and transform the pace and quality of services to the citizens of Ventura. Agresso will release Ventura from the limitations of a 25-year-old legacy system that was functionally obsolete and could not adapt to new processes and procedures. “Government constantly changes and it was time for us to change. Our systems weren’t up to date and therefore our systems and processes were limited,” said John Emerson, IT Director, City of Ventura. “The Agresso suite will help us considerably improve response time to customers. Agresso provides a platform that enables the City to quickly adapt to change." Ventura will implement a wide-range of Agresso applications including Agresso Financials, Procurement, Contracts, Human Resources/Payroll, Project Costing & Billing, Cashiering, and Reporting and Analysis Suite. The implementations will support 650 full-time city employees and 1,400 users overall. The City of Ventura is a coastal community located 60 miles north of Los Angeles. With a population of over 100,000, Ventura prides itself as a full-service city, operating its own Police and Fire departments, a Community Services Department, a Public Works Department and a Community Development Department. The City also has a Human Resources Department, Administrative Services Department as well as the City Manager's Department and City Attorney's Office. All these departments need agile technology to support them. The Agresso Businesses Living IN Change (BLINC) ™ strategy and VITA architecture advantage will be necessary to support these departments and was important in the selection of Agresso ERP by the City of Ventura. Agresso VITA is an N-Tier, Web-based scalable architecture that is Microsoft.NET compliant, supports extensible Mark-up Language (XML), Web Services and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Agresso’s VITA architecture is distinctly different from other leading ERP solutions, and most particularly those that are the result of disparate software and technology acquisitions. Adaptability and agility were major qualities that appealed to the City of Ventura. “Today, city governments have to be proactive in offering new or better services to customers,” said Emerson.
The City of Ventura plans to be proactive in several ways, including automating the purchasing process from requisitions. A process that now takes several weeks will be done in a day. Other benefits will include delivering employee performance and feedback in real time mode and improved internal controls of system users which can aid in compliance and auditing efforts Ventura may pursue. The Agresso architecture allows users to address their changing environment and adapt their business processes to meet evolving needs. “The Agresso solution offers an architecture that makes ERP more adaptable to business change,” said Shelley Zapp, president of Agresso – North America. “Forward thinking cities, like Ventura, prove the need for local governments to automate and improve business processes is just as pressing as that need among the private sector.” Agresso will provide a far-reaching platform for e-government at Ventura and enable collaboration, which is something that doesn’t exist at this time. “Today, much of the government sector is still stuck in the past, where private businesses were many years ago,” said Emerson. “But with Agresso we expect faster turnaround with new automated business processes and better information delivery for both our customers and employees.”
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