One County Finds that an HRMS Can Cause Major Headaches

One Colorado county with about 2,000 employees is finding that getting a human resources system is like any other major piece of technology: getting it to work the way you want it to isn’t so easy.

According to the Fort Collins Coloradoan, Larimer has spent nearly $3 million implementing and trying to fix the Oracle system “that officials say is plagued with errors.” “It’s like having an old car,” said Bob Keister, the county’s budget manager. “How much do you spend on it before you get off that car and get another?”

The Coloradoan reports that the county’s payroll technicians have worked overtime on evenings and weekends to meet payroll deadlines. Information on some paychecks–such as how much sick time and vacation time people have–has been wrong. County Manager Frank Lancaster says that correcting these problems is “like having a root canal every two weeks.”

An Oracle spokesman says the company is looking into the problems and wants to help fix them. But County Manager Frank Lancaster says Oracle has sent programming patches that sometimes “fixed one thing and caused two other things to go wrong.” Oracle is making sure the county has direct contact with programmers so that it can fix problems more quickly, according to the newspaper report.