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The Challenge: Legacy Software Use Creating Resource Drag
Gwinnett County, one of America's fastest-growing counties for the past 20 years, combines city and suburban living and has a current population of just over 833,213 people. Approximately 30 miles northeast of Atlanta, the County includes 437 square miles and is home to 15 municipalities as well as more than 275,000 land parcels. In 2004, as the population continued to grow at a fast rate, Gwinnett County reached the point where its legacy IBM mainframe, deployed in the late 1980s with custom COBOL applications for managing property assessment and tax billing, could no longer meet the County's needs. 
"The system was resource-intensive and not easy for end users to interact with," said the Gwinnett County Tax Assessor's Office Division Director, Steve Pruitt. "Any report requests had to be sent to the IT department and run overnight, so it took a long time to get the information we needed. And if a report required non-standard formatting, we needed to request additional work by a programmer that would add another day or two to the process. If a mistake was made along the way, the process was extended even further."
To address this issue, the County began looking for a new system to manage property-assessment processes and issued an RFP. "We needed a more robust, easier-to-use system and were outgrowing the capabilities of our old system in terms of support and new requirements for the additional property parcels we had to track," Pruitt added. "We also wanted to improve upon our overall business-process efficiencies."
When the staff at the County Tax Commissioner’s Office found out about the change the Assessor's Office was working through, they too realized they needed a new system with up-to-date capabilities. The County expanded the RFP to include this requirement as well.
"We decided at that point that we wanted to partner with a solution provider that could address our assessment and property tax system as well as our records needs," said Jerry Kemp, the Gwinnett County Chief Deputy Tax Commissioner. "We did not want to work with two different solution provider partners, and we realized that solutions from the same partner would likely offer a higher degree of integration, which would allow the assessment and tax offices to share more process efficiencies."
The Solution: Manatron GRM
Gwinnett County received seven proposals in response to the RFP, but only two solution providers offered all-inclusive solutions that included assessment, records and tax, including Manatron’s GRM solution.
The County then conducted a scripted, three-day demo with both finalists by providing data from several-thousand records and asking both solution providers to show how their solutions could perform with actual data.
"We video-taped both demonstrations, and Manatron clearly exceeded what the other solution provider had to offer," Kemp said. "Manatron created a superior presentation."
In addition to Manatron's proficiency with the presentation, the assessment, records and tax features that Manatron's solutions provided also convinced Gwinnett County. "We were also impressed with Manatron's knowledge of our processes," Pruitt said. "They understood and discussed the implications of terms such as the Marshall & Swift black box cost-modeling system and income-approach valuations. We also could see how Manatron works diligently at updating products as well as keeping current with legislative developments and software standards. We were also impressed with the level of support that Manatron offers—it goes far beyond what our previous solution provider offered."
The Deployment: Legislative Changes Made Throughout
After winning the head-to-head demonstration, Manatron recommended Gwinnett County deploy GRM Records, ProVal, and GRM Tax. GRM ProVal, a robust property-appraisal solution (CAMA), provides assessment administration and GRM Records provides property mapping capabilities while also supporting real property and personal property valuation with traditional approaches including cost, market and income valuations. GRM Tax helps manage property-tax billing and collection processes by offering the ability to maintain, bill, collect, distribute and track properties and associated taxes. The solution also facilitates management of real property, personal property, mobile homes, minerals, and special assessments.
The GRM ProVal solution deployment went very smoothly while Gwinnett County was actually the first County to partner with Manatron on its GRM Records and GRM Tax solution. "Although this provided challenges, it also allowed us to help Manatron fully-develop the solution, which helped ensure it could meet all of our tax billing and collection needs," Kemp said. "Manatron's developers diligently tested and built revisions during the deployment, and Manatron demonstrated how they have the knowledge, skill-base and experience as well as the resources to keep projects moving forward. They listened to our input and worked with us as a true professional partner to develop the product properly."
During the GRM Records ProVal and GRM Tax deployments, the County also had to react to continual legislation that required compliance changes. Manatron promptly reacted to those changes during the deployments and has continued to act quickly with legislative changes that continue to be enacted on a regular basis by the State of Georgia.
"Another obstacle that Manatron helped us overcome was the need to help end-users become comfortable with the Windows environment after using mainframe applications for 20 years," Pruitt said. "There was also a different set of vocabulary terminology to get used to, but Manatron provided training resources who took extra time to prepare us to use the system."
The Benefits: Enhanced Constituent Relations
With the GRM ProVal solution, the staff at the Assessor's Office can now run reports, such as sales-ratio reports, on their own rather than submitting requests to the IT team, which was the case with the mainframe legacy application. "This capability is especially helpful when we need to edit or reformat a standard report," Pruitt said. "With the mainframe application, editing a report required extra programming by our IT staff. But with GRM ProVal, appraisers and the admin staff can now do all the work on their own for reports such as value abstracts, parcel lists, and advanced queries of property-class code groups. Given that we have more the 300,000 property parcels to manage, the solution has made us much more efficient." 
The Assessor's staff can now view large amounts of data and run ratio studies to adjust neighborhoods within 30 minutes compared to the previous system that took until the next day to generate results. GRM ProVal also allows the County to view information in different ways. The staff can quickly re-class neighborhoods, batch-change grades and conditions, and batch-update land tables without having to wait for help from IT.
"Previously, it required 30-45 full-time resource days to update the cost tables after collecting data from the field and then inputting, testing and adjusting the data," Pruitt said. "But with GRM ProVal, we can just test against the information in the Marshall & Swift cost module embedded within GRM ProVal. It now only takes us two full-time resource days."
The Windows graphical user interface environment has made report generation so easy for Gwinnett County that the Assessor's Office has been able to update many business processes. Instead of requiring help from IT, reports can now be quickly generated by the entire staff. And with the help of GRM Tax, the County can now run batch-update processes during the day rather than after hours so that each citizen's account is immediately updated. The staff can also now more easily view information related to individual parcels and can access more data areas.
"We also have better audit trails," Kemp said. "If a taxpayer requests a correction to their assessment, the request immediately flows across to the tax side, and we can see where the change originated. In the past, we would not know who made a change, and if an audit was made a year later, there would not be a trail."
As part of the GRM Tax solution, Gwinnett County also deployed the Manatron eGovernment solution that provides e-commerce features to allow citizens to pay their tax bills and access public information over the Web. This helps reduce foot traffic in the County office and makes it easier for the citizens to pay tax bills on-time. "Citizens can also immediately view payment history and drill-down into the charges to see which taxing authority issued each charge," Kemp said. "We can actually provide more info on the Web than we can on hard-copy bills, and it's very easy for citizens to use. The content management feature has been beneficial as well since it allows us to post changes and information updates instantly."
In summing-up the Gwinnett County partnership with Manatron, Pruitt said, "Manatron foremost offers a professional partnership to help support their products. They realize that our input is valuable, and this is critical for a product to succeed. We can also depend on Manatron to work through any issues we might face due to new legislation or other factors. Whenever something comes, up Manatron always tells us—don't worry, we'll take care of it."