Rethinking Budgeting: CIP Evolution in Concord, North Carolina

The City of Concord, North Carolina, has a very sophisticated budgeting development process—so much so that it complicated the city’s recent enterprise resource planning (ERP) project. City leaders recognized early on that selecting a new enterprise resource planning system would affect the finance, human resources, payroll, purchasing, inventory, budgeting, and capital planning departments, making it one of the most consequential administrative decisions the organization would face. Leaders also recognized they needed a disciplined approach to planning and procurement with an emphasis on process understanding, cross-functional input, and evaluation methods designed to test how well each solution would align with the city’s operational needs.

As the city moved further into the ERP effort, discussions began to expand beyond procurement and into broader questions about the financial data model, chart of accounts design, and how capital improvement plan (CIP) projects would be budgeted and managed in  the future. The procurement process thereby served as the front end of a much larger transformation. It was a rigorous selection process in its own right, but it also created the foundation for deeper organizational changes.