StateWays is the only magazine exclusively covering the control state system within the beverage alcohol industry, with annual updates from liquor control commissions and alcohol control boards and yearly fiscal reporting from control jurisdictions
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This project will ultimately amount to replacing most of our core business software, and re-engineering most of our business processes; it is very easy to underesti- mate the scope and impact of this project." The current back-office system, dubbed Sequoia, is a very old, yet beloved, system, developed in-house. "We will eventually roll it out of the building with a fond farewell," said Perricone. But the software is 15 years old, written in Cobol and uses a Unix operating system. "It's hard to find people to hire who can pro- gram in that language," said Perricone, "and the operating system is obsolete." Also, the hardware is almost 30 years old. Meanwhile, the POS system is 15-year-old software running on 10-year-old hardware. Maintaining these systems has become increasingly difficult and they "can't do what people are used to being able to do. Sharing infor- mation, for example, even internal- ly, can be hard," said Perricone. The systems can't handle gift cards and other kinds of promotions. Ironically, the system's old way of handling credit-card transactions – using dial-up modems and phone lines – protected it from security breaches and made compliance with PCI standards easier. The information was never on a public network. That will change with the new system. "And our situation is unique," said Perricone. Because the Vermont DLC uses agents to handle its retail sales, it is these agents and their employees in their own facilities who are actually handling the transactions. "The agency stores have employees we didn't hire and we have no control over the physical location. The PCI standards assume you have control over your own peo- ple and own facilities," explained Perricone, "yet we don't and we assume all liability for the credit-card pro- cessing: the merchant account is the state of Vermont." The DLC is looking at ways to meet PCI standards while minimizing the impact on the agents and their employees. Using a Consulting Firm T 30 he Vermont DLC issued an RFP for a consul- tant to work with it on its new systems and awarded the work to BerryDunn. This consult- ing firm has, since last spring, been working closely with the DLC. "They did an extensive documentation of our existing system," explained Perricone. "They drew up a requirements list. They explored new busi- ness processes we might want to implement and looked at changes in retail that we might want to respond to." BerryDunn has been holding extensive, multiple sessions with all the sections of the DLC involved with the two computer systems. At each pass, the DLC staff is asked for suggestions and recom- mendations and asked to review the documentation of the process thus far. "We want peo- ple at the department to think of this project the department is doing, not a project IT is doing," said Perricone. "Everyone has at least one idea in the project. Everyone has a much better idea of what to expect and our peo- ple are more invested." All of this is in prepara- tion to write a second RFP, which is currently in its second draft, this one for the actual vendor who will provide and install the systems. "When the sys- tem vendor comes on board, they will essen- tially be starting on sec- ond base," said Perricone. "This gives us a good head start." The DLC is already experiencing benefits from the increased communication between the divisions and the information-technology staff. "We are working now on a number of improvements, in the old system, that IT didn't know about," explained Perricone. "A lot of times people are doing their work one way and they don't know that we could fix an easier way for them. They don't think to mention it." The plan going forward for the Vermont DLC is to have the RFP for a vendor issued within the next few months, to start by replacing the central-office system first and to have both systems fully deployed in one to two years. Keeping track of all the moving parts when making such large-scale changes to a control-state agency's com- puter systems is no easy task. SW StateWays s www.stateways.com s September/October 2012