Telling you we're the name is failed.

Believe in his source.

I see it with still.

I'm hearing his voice.

Telling me what still is the noise.

Only still you hear his voice.

Telling you it's going to be in space.

Believe in his source.

I sit with Stone.

I'm hearing his voice.

Telling me M and Good afternoon.

The time is now 2.02 PM on Wednesday, April 8th, 2026, and the City of San Antonio B session is now called to order.

Madam Clerk, please call roll.

Councilmember Corps.

Councilmember Mickey Rodriguez.

Present.

Councilmember Via Gran.

Councilmember Mungia.

Councilmember Castillo.

Councilmember Galvan.

Here.

Councilmember Alderete Gavito.

Here.

Councilmember Mesa Gonzalez.

Councilmember Spears.

Councilmember White.

Mayor Jones.

Here.

Mayor, we have quorum.

Great.

Thank you.

This meeting will have an update on the Costa Connect project to upgrade the city's financial and procurement systems.

Eric, over to you.

Thank you, Mayor.

Thank you, Mayor.

Good afternoon, uh Mayor and Council.

So an exciting one this afternoon.

Um, but uh a very important item.

Was that facetious?

So we want to give you all an update on the next phase of our COSA Connect program, which is kind of our long-term effort to modernize uh our financial and procurement systems.

We've already gone through two phases.

Um, and I know uh we were in this room a couple weeks ago, and and uh CPS was talking about uh a similar project.

Um we have relied on SAP as an organization uh since 2004.

Um, and that support ends in 2027.

So over the last couple of years we have been implementing adjustments and new systems and upgrades.

Um and the first two phases have gone um remarkably well.

Um the final phase that SAP Ariba will um will implement uh will improve um financial operations, uh streamline some of our internal processes to include uh some of the things that you all touch as council members.

Um this is a post-solicitation briefing, and um Troy and and Craig will walk us through the criticality of the financial systems, how we are taking this opportunity to align with best practices and take advantage of um some of the tools that we have not been able to utilize in the past based on the previous SAP implementation.

Our um our budget system is going through um uh um update right now as well, and that'll be utilized for the first time not this coming year but the following year.

Um, so it'll be in line for the 2027 budget, and we have already successfully implemented our human resource aspect of this system, um, which was um not very robust under our 2004 system, so it gives us a lot of ability to manage and communicate um uh through across across all departments um through our employees.

So Troy or Craig's gonna kick us off.

And I've got the first half of the presentation, and then Troy will get us through the second half.

I just want to take a few moments um to level set us on the program and what we're accomplishing here with the program.

Uh Eric has already kind of laid some of that out for you.

Um, but some of you may not have been here when we started this because uh it started a long, long time ago, actually.

Um but the first thing is uh Eric already said we've been using the SAP system since 2004.

Uh been it's been a uh a steady horse for us, a system of record for almost two decades, and at the basically we are at an end of life on the current system that goes in 2027.

So the team has been working um the last almost two years.

I'll show you three years.

I'll show you a slide here in a little bit about the overall timeline for this program.

But the whole intent of this has been able to modernize our ERP system as we move forward.

Um this is not just a technology upgrade.

I want to keep saying that over and over and over again.

There's a significant technology upgrade going on inside of this, but this is truly an opportunity for us to do a business transformation.

This is a business-led reinvention of our core operations.

So IT is integral in the implementation of this, but all of our business partners that I'll show you here in a little bit are actually working through eliminating manual and fragmented processes.

Every time we go through any of these upgrades, we're actually starting with design sessions that come back to our core processes inside of our shared services, enabling real-time data-driven decision making.

So now we don't have data in spreadsheets anymore.

We have data in centralized repositories where we can actually start to use this for real data-driven decision making.

One of the things I learned when I joined the city nine years ago and I sat in Ben Gorzell's office.

He told me to fix SAP.

I didn't know what that meant at the time.

And when I went out and asked a bunch of people what do we need to fix, they all said, oh my God, it is the worst looking system we've ever seen.

I still feel like I'm in the mainframe from the 1990s.

And I tried to use it myself, and it was incredibly difficult.

So for those who have been using it for 20 years, I give them tons of credit to figure out how to do this.

But what we've been promising is an intuitive user-friendly system as we go forward, and that's exactly what we're getting on this as well.

And at the end of the day, we need to strengthen our compliance, our transparency, and our financial stewardship.

This allows us to bring all that information together as we go forward.

So I want to reinforce that as you look at these components of our program, you'll see the COSA Connect HR, which is what we has gone live in 2025, and we've been working through these core components, and then budget, which partially went live in 2025 and fully goes live when we bring everything together on the finance side.

You see these very specific functions, but you also see over there on the right, you see what we call our core processes.

So we're not building for finance OMB, HR.

We're building for core processes like source to pay, order to cash, hire to retire, acquire retire, which is the asset component, budget to report, and then the integral IT systems below.

So it's a very business-led workflow-led process as we've done this.

This is the timeline, and if I could rewrite this timeline, I put a little box in the upper left-hand corner, which was about 18 months of pre-planning work before we even kicked off the success factors implementation.

That was a significant work by the team to go back out into the operations and figure out where the pain points were.

And I'll just give you a quick little summary.

18 months of pre-planning with SAP directly as they came in, worked across 14 cross-functional discovery sessions, found 278 pain points, 311 capability improvements, and 187 divine value drivers before we even talked about technology.

Those are all business things to that we determined we needed to fix.

And then we laid out this program, which was really to bring this into in phases as we went forward.

Success factors is the SAP software for HR.

Sherpa is the software that we brought in to support OMB in the budgeting process, and what we're here to talk about today is the S4 HANA and AREBA component as we go forward.

That's what Troy's gonna take you through in detail.

And then overall, we have our Gartner partners here helping us with oversight and quality assurance overall in the program.

So this has been about a five-year journey.

You can see the last uh three years up here, and we're not actually done until the end of FY27 as we go forward.

I knew you would ask me about AI.

So I just put in a slide.

So in every platform we own and are buying, every vendor has claimed they have AI capabilities.

We're gonna call them generative AI capabilities.

We have an opportunity to go through that.

They're not true artificial intelligence, they're much more assistance to the user.

There's two ways I want to talk about AI and SAP, just so we're really, really clear.

One is these are the built-in uh AI capabilities that come with the software inside of success factors, inside of S4 and Ariba.

There are things that think of that is if you bring up, if you use Gemini or if you use any of these other tools today, think of a window pane that pops up on the right-hand side when you're working in your email or you're working in something else.

That's the embedded capabilities.

So you can use it to be an assistant.

Clearly, we're gonna help it for sourcing and buying for the staff to build solicitations.

We know that we can build off templates.

We don't have to build everything one at a time.

Assistance can help us do that.

That is built into the Ariba platform.

Data driven insights.

When you can start using natural language query to do your advanced analytics, you don't have to call IT to build you detailed complex reports, an incredible built-in component.

I will always say this disclaimer it's only as good as the data that we have as you work through that.

So we have to spend a lot of time in our data mapping and our data cleanup as we go through this process.

But to be able to use that for visualization is very important.

It's also AI ready in the sense that we can use this as process governance to help the staff work more efficiently, providing job aids, automation where possible, process flows.

So now we're not all working off one-off documents, our own best our own practices, we're working up best practices built into the system.

And it also integrates with our native system.

So as we're a co-pilot, a Microsoft Copilot shop, there's integration of those as well.

The last line on the mind here that I want to be clear about is uh additional AI capabilities that SAP SAP brings to the table, and they call it Joule.

You'll see that out there in SAP.

Think of that as not embedded in your tool, but an assistant on top of your tool.

So now you can use this virtual assistant to do a variety of other things.

We are not implementing that in the first implementation.

And I'm going to tell you why specifically, it's really expensive, and we haven't figured out how it's metered.

And we're going to talk about this with a lot of AI tools as we go forward.

It's usage-based.

So when you open it and use it, you start paying the data center charges on different things.

We need to experiment with this.

We need to learn more about the capability.

We need to learn about more about the pricing model.

This concept of credits is built into every one of these additional tools.

And so we're going to use that in one of our implementations internally, learn more about that, and later in the program come back and decide whether this is worthwhile to add on to these capabilities that we have.

But everything else on this is built into the tools, and we plan on taking advantage of.

All right, it does cost some money.

This is a 71.9 million dollar program over like the what I showed you is over about a five-year period.

All the things, uh the top line item is what we're here to talk to you about today.

We have gone through a solicitation process for the Ariba S4 system integrator that's budgeted about 14 million dollars.

Troy's going to take you through that.

Everything else on this has already been approved as in previous implementations.

You can see their SAP services, what we pay them directly.

Um, uh our Gartner partner for 6.8 million, which is our verification and validation, the success factors integrator, which was Accenture for our first phase, uh budget development, which is UNO for the OMB phase, and then 22 million dollars of software licenses that we pay for SAP as we go forward, 15 million in contractors and staff, and we have a 2.7 million program contingency that we're carrying at this time.

All right, so with that, I'd like to hand it to Troy to take you through the solicitation.

Thank you, Craig.

Good afternoon, Mayor and Council.

And we kind of joked in the beginning about this being an exciting topic.

Well, my goal is to keep this as boring as possible.

And I think it's probably Craig's goal as well.

And there's a good reason for that because if it does become exciting, it's because something has gone wrong in our implementation.

So when we start out this process, as Craig mentioned, there was a lot of pre-work that was done.

We took that pre-work, we used all that pre-worked embedded requests for uh proposals.

Um the actual released on 829, and in that request proposal, we're really looking for a partner with the experience who has done this on the breadth and scale of the city of San Antonio, has focused on finance and the procurement, and has um mitigated those risks and really looked at those challenges and brings that experience with them.

So went through that.

We started receiving uh responses on October 28th.

We had an evaluation panel comprised of all the business owners and the business sponsors, including myself, Craig.

We also had Justina Tate, our assistant city manager, Renee Frieda, our director of HR, Melanie Keaton, our deputy finance director, and Helicamada, our assistant finance director, Kevin Goodwin, our CTO, and Vidya from CPS Energy, who's actually leading their transformation right now.

So we had a robust team, and I think one of the things about this team is a lot of the people on this on this team, we've done this before.

And so we understand kind of what it takes to put these things in place and what to look for.

You know, Craig talked about phase three.

I'd like to talk about a little bit more in depth about what is the scope.

Um, you know, Craig talked about the six work streams.

Like talk a little bit about each of those work streams individually and what they do.

The first one is source to pay, and that is really looking at our procurement process from cradle to grave, meaning from when we issue a bid or an RFP all the way through the evaluation process, through the awarding a contract, and even all the way through paying the actual vendor on the back end.

So looking at that, and there's a lot of pieces to that, um, and that would be focused on the AREBA process or the REBA system that we will be implementing.

The next area is really focus on the finance and touch on the HR.

The second one is order to cash.

This is our revenue collections.

This is a piece that has all of our customers embedded into it.

It tracks all of our invoices going out to our customers for our goods and our services, and also we can run reports and aging and really manage our customer receivables, which translates into our financial reports as well.

Then we have the hire to retire.

This integrates very heavily with the HR functions that Craig talked about through success factors that really laid down the foundation for HR.

That flows through into our payroll and time management, um, all the way through hiring employee through paying an employee through when they retire or leave the service of the city of San Antonio.

And then we have the acquire to retire.

This is how we manage our capital assets.

When we buy an asset, when we build an asset, um, what's the life cycle of the asset?

How do we maintain that asset and keep those records, and when does it need that proper plant maintenance?

All the way through when we dispose of it.

Then lastly, looking at how do we report?

We're collecting a lot of data in these systems.

One of the challenges we have today is getting that data out and putting it in a presumable format that's understandable.

And sometimes some of the data we can't access to it, we don't have access to it.

So really looking at that financial reporting in terms of our grants or capital projects.

All of our operating funds, and then I know we we this council likes to talk about KPIs, looking at KPIs as far as you know, how are we performing?

Not only how are we performing here, but looking at prior to the system how we're performing and what efficiencies have we gained after the system's been implemented.

Then lastly, the managing the IT is the security around the system, our role-based security, data governance, archiving, and the analytics of our data itself.

The next area I wanted to highlight, because I think this is a good opportunity.

We talked about we've had two conversations with EWDC, one surrounding the mayor's task with collaborating with the diverse force diverse business stakeholders and reviewing the city procurement processes to ensure access to a full talent pool.

This was the charge that the mayor gave to that committee.

We've been to that committee twice talking to them, and we think this is actually an excellent opportunity.

One to dust off some of the feedback that we've gotten from our vendors, looking at that feedback from our process, then also look at see how it can be incorporated into the configuration and the design of the system.

So we think it's a it's just an optimal opportunity and a time to do that and go back and visit with those stakeholders, reconfirm some of the things that we've heard, and then incorporate those where we can based on where we can align to the industry best practices and then configure that technology to support these best practices.

And this will largely align with the work stream I talked about on procure to pay.

Circling back to the evaluation.

So we received four responses.

One from IBM, International Business Machines Corporation, Ernst and Young, ENY, Accenture, and then Firecat Studios.

This is the initial evaluation that the team performed based on the written proposals that were provided by the four respondents.

We looked at in terms of their experience, background, and qualifications, and the proposed plan.

You can see the point structures for a total of 60, price 15 points, Sabeta 10 from a prime function, local preference of 10, and then veteran-owned small businesses of five.

You can see where they ranked as far as the written proposals in terms of EBQ or experienced background qualifications and proposed plan with IBM and Accenture rising to the top.

In terms of price, both IBM and ENY had the best pricing under their written proposals.

And then also looking at the local preference program, where you had ENY or SNYoung getting five points and Censure, due to having a significant local business presence, which is defined as 20% of their business workforce or 100 or more employees.

And then Firecat Studio received 10 on Sabata to being a small prime.

Based on this, we selected the based on the written proposals in the evaluation.

We selected three of these firms to actually take the interviews.

So when we actually went through the evaluation, as I mentioned, we invited all three of them to do interviews, spent the full day with these firms.

After refining our scores, IBM rose to the top of 66.96 points versus 52.25 and 39.74.

And when you look at the firms, the one thing that stood out about IBM was on their experience, background and qualifications, some of the large implementations and complex implications, implementations that they had performed, but also the depth of experience that the individual people had was in some cases 10, majority of them 25 plus years experience in implementing SAP.

In terms of price, they were, as I mentioned, at 14.96, comparable to ENY, and you'll see the pricing here in a second.

That was been slightly modified due to negotiations.

Based on the interviews, based on the experience background qualifications and the proposed plan, we're recommending to you to move forward with IBM.

In terms of the contract, the contract is fully negotiated.

There may be a couple minor tweaks that we still have to make.

So vendor, I mean, IBM partnered with Systema Technologies.

Systema is a small business enterprise.

They are locally headquartered here in San Antonio.

They will be performing the majority of the training and the assisting with the testing.

And I'll talk to you'll kind of see those on the phases and where those fit in on the next couple of slides.

Then the other one they partner with is EPI USC America.

They are one of the well-known payroll experts when it comes to SAP.

So those two subcontractors were who they partnered with in terms of this contract.

Looking at this as a two-year term with optional one-year renewals, hopefully, we don't need the optional one-year renewals.

We have a goal live, and you'll see that on the next next couple of slides going live with the majority of this on October 1st of 2027.

Looking at the contract value, Craig mentioned the 14.1 in the out of the total contract budget.

So we negotiate a fixed fee or base fee of 11.3 million dollars.

As we go through this, there are certain things we will decide whether we need or we don't need.

And that we'll get that clarity as we go through the methodology of exploring and designing.

And in the event that we need those, we're asking for your consideration for these optional fees of 1.7 million dollars.

And I'll talk about that here in a second below.

We also know that when we go through these contracts, there will be challenges.

There will be things that we missed.

And so we um we're proposing a 10% contingency for a total of 14.1 million dollars.

The optional fees you can see below from breaking out that 1.5 million dollars.

We have what's called Fiore development.

In this new SAP version, the way we interact with the system is different.

Today it's on based on transaction codes.

Today, this has a better user experience in terms of your mobile device or your desktop.

And we want to be able to have some flexibility that we need additional experiences that we can actually do that through this.

And this gives us a bucket of hours to do that.

Craig mentioned all the work that we had accomplished in front of moving into this.

One of those items was identifying all the different systems that touch SAP, all the interfaces.

In the event that we did not capture all those interfaces, we wanted an option to be able to come back and if we missed one interface, to be able to actually how we configure and the new system works with those those systems we may have missed.

Specialized hypercare hours.

I'll talk a little bit more about hypercare on the timeline on the next slide.

But the base timeline, the base contract is going to have three months of hype hyper care embedded in the contract.

What hyper care is once we go live, we don't want this consultants running off and disappearing.

We are probably gonna need some help and some assistance and stabilizing the system once we go live, running payrolls, running procurements.

We want to be able to reach out and touch one of those consultants and say, hey, we need your help still.

So post-go live, we have three months of hypercare.

In addition to that three months, we know that the system continues on and there are other activities in the future that we have not experienced yet.

We may have not have closed the year for payroll, 1099s, W-2s, closing out the fiscal year.

So this bucket of hours gives us some flexibility to be able to come back and say, hey, we still need some assistance, but that may be that may be 12 months down the road after the base hypercare has expired.

Security role management, looking at how security is configured in the system, gives them some flexibility there into role management.

This has been an issue, and I think Councilwoman Via Gran has seen it coming to the audit committee on occasion as far as in the internal audits when we um may still have people that are active in the systems that may have left the city.

This will be put in place, and hopefully with this process, we'll eliminate some of those challenges.

And then the target operating model.

This is a lesson learned that I had specifically from implementing the first system in 2004.

Um, so yes, I do have a problem.

People say our system is antiquated, and I'm the one that actually implemented it in 2004.

Um but this really allows us once we implement the system, um, we know that we are gonna operate differently, that we made a different may need a different number of people running accounts payable, or where a certain function resides in the organization may need to sit someplace else.

So this will actually allow us to actually look at and give us a roadmap to once we implement the system.

How do the people function and support that system?

And so, in total, these optional fees are 1.5 million dollars.

There's some other things that we are keeping our eyes on as far as future considerations.

We know there's an end-of-life for the current what we call TRIP that manages our travel, looking at the SAP concur module in the future, maybe as a replacement, also looking at other things like business role management, data archival and retention, and then there's some additional functionality that allows us to manage multiple companies within SAP.

So those are things that when we go through the design, we'll see if there's future enhancements that we need to make, as well as other things that may come up that we're not aware of.

So, in terms of the COSA Connect uh program timeline specific to phase three, Craig talked about we've been working on this since 2023.

I'd like to talk a little bit about the methodology that we're putting in place.

So there is a I think it's believed SAP Activate.

This is a proprietary methodology that SAP employs to reduce risk, and IBM comes in with their tools and their propriety methodology and layers it on top of that to make sure that's successful.

But all these phases build on top of each other.

So once if y'all are amenable to the contract with IBM, um, once they're on board, we'll start the discover phase where we're talking about kind of the norming of the team, the project initiation, our formal kickoffs, on board, orienting the project team, um, moving on to the prepare phase, which is our detailed planning and schedule development.

The explore phase is where we really start getting down into the design and the technical and functional specifications and getting the additional stakeholder input.

And then we take all that information and we start building on the system and configuring the system.

Once the system is built, then we start moving into the realize and test function phase, which is testing, unit testing, end user testing, or integration testing, um, accepting the system in certain places.

Then we also train the users how to use it.

So very important that these things don't get out of sync, because once you start training, if you're still designing a system, it's a recipe for disaster.

So this would be very rigorous process moving through this.

Then ultimately deploy and go live, and then the hyper care hours are the hyper care three months after that I mentioned to you.

And above, you can see kind of the timeline for each S4, which is finance, and then AREBA, which is procurement, and then those prospective prospective goal lives for each of those.

With that, Mayor Council, um looking for your support today, and um bring this contract for your consideration on April 30th with IBM for both the implementation of SAP AREBA, which is our procurement, and then SAP S4 HANA with our financials.

Craig and I are available to ask answer any questions you may have.

Mayor, just a couple of points just to um not necessarily specifically covered, but I think it's important for to share with you all you know, the the uh Troy mentioned the the experience level of this.

Um fortunately or unfortunately, uh a number of people that are still here were part of that transition from mainframe to SAP in 2004.

Troy used to have brown hair, it turned gray in 2003.

Um so part of this is making sure that you know these transitions are can be extremely difficult.

And I mayor, I can only imagine places like the Pentagon.

Um, but they're they're very difficult.

And so managing the project and having project governance is key.

Um secondly, uh, as part of our part of my monthly uh department head executive meeting, um, whether we have a long agenda or not, we're updating the executives on these aspects because it directly affects them.

And and and I'll give you an example.

We have what we call subject matter experts within the organization, whether they are in Debbie's office or the finance department or budget or public works, the individuals and employees that are operating those systems now and will be operating them in the future, those individuals get tapped to do uh double duty to make sure that what we're being what we're constructing um is usable at the end of the at the end of the uh day, and it it is a we I we keep it in front of the I keep it in front of the department heads because um it has to be a priority given everything that we all do and that everything that employees do, this has to be a priority, and and frankly that we learned that through experience.

Um so we have a lot of folks in this organization that are engaged on those phases that uh both Craig and Troy talked about.

I wanted to make sure you were aware of that.

Thanks.

Thanks, Eric.

Um, I during the pre-brief, that's exactly what I was thinking about.

I mean, the organizational change, as Craig rightly put it, this isn't just about some IT thing, right?

This is really about transforming how you do business and the um organizational change part of that, the culture piece of it can frankly be the most challenging.

So I appreciate the um the both the presentation by by Craig as well as by by Troy.

Um thanks, Troy.

Uh again, listening through it.

The most important part um for me was again helping, as Eric just kind of foot stomped here.

The um while it's a big chunk of money, 476k could be enough or could be widely wildly insufficient uh for how we understand what the future um how workers that may be displaced or need may need to be upskilled and repositioned could be.

So that part of the contract, if I remember correctly, that's exactly that's the target, where'd it go?

Target operating model.

That's all for kind of what the workforce footprint looks like.

Is that right?

That is um the project will encompass the whole change management component, and we have a change management team.

And so the change management specifically on focus on managing the change, how one person moves into the system.

This piece is specifically an organizational alignment.

So and Renee will kill me if she hears me say this, but yeah, does payroll fit in finance or does it fit in HR?

It's things like that nature.

And then do we have the right people with the right skills in those areas to do that?

So they so that again because that's one of the most important parts here.

Um that will be just deciding kind of where it goes, but now overseeing the execution of that, is that also IBM, or is that following to the specific department heads, like who's actually doing the thing once the once it's better been determined what the plan is?

Running the system or so there's so target operating model that's like hey, this is how we're gonna do the thing.

Who now is going to monitor the implementation of it so that it is operating as as intended.

Yeah.

So talk through the actual implementation.

Um we will have a full-blown executive steering committee that will be sponsored by Craig and myself and an entire team.

So all aspects of the implementation will run through us, and we'll be monitoring that.

Post-implation, this governance body will stay in place as well to monitor it.

Um working with IBM, but IBM will be the individual that will be guiding us through that 476,000 dollars if we select it to actually organize and recommend that how we're organized post go live.

Mayor, and I think the um maybe to get a little bit more granular to your question, um, really the the folks that I'm gonna look at to make sure that we're tracking and monitoring that are gonna be HR and the budget office, right?

Because there will be as as and those two are key because um even if there are potential impacts to the number of people that do X.

Um we always know, and you are all very familiar with the fact that as the city continues to grow and we need additional resources, maybe it's retooling.

And so the people that we relied on to do that now, um, HR and the budget office to manage and track, um, and then where you know, where we have a need for additional positions over here, the the HR and the budget folks are the ones that see it across the entire organization and can hit those linkages, and so they'll be really key to that that implementation and tracking.

And committee as well, yeah, and the team.

So, one clarification uh the consultants will be will the IBM consultants will depart at the end of hyper care.

So we're not relying on consultants after implementation to take us through that.

That is ours to do.

And where's Joe?

Joe Wave.

So Joe actually is from the organizational change management team that we put in place specifically for this program.

So he'll carry that through as a process, and then we'll fall with on that ourselves.

That's helpful, thank you.

Um, and I know we had a successful audit recently, but this is um this, as you mentioned, Craig and Troy, makes it easier for us to even further audit ourselves, right, in a timely fashion.

Great.

Um, the other piece when I always think about uh new programs like this, and and frankly, the how old the other system is um is the cybersecurity piece.

Uh so can you talk a little bit about some of the savings that we hope to uh realize a results as a result of moving to this, not only the savings, but also the um how much more secure this makes us.

I'm trying to train Troy up to talk to that question, but he's he ran away from the podium on that.

Um a significant part of this is not cybersecurity as in how do you get into our into our environment, but this is another cloud application.

I want to be clear about that.

So we're moving SAP from our internal servers up into the cloud, like we're doing with most programs.

So that last box that um Troy showed you around manage IT has a lot to do with data security permissions, uh, and there's both internal and external as we go that.

So SAP brings its own tools that we can use to support that specifically, and that works under our cybersecurity shell and our data permissions that we manage.

Thank you.

Um more for uh more for Troy, but um you know, we like to call ourselves Cyber City USA, Cybersecurity City USA, all the things.

Um, and so I was surprised that we didn't have more local entities fare better in competition, right?

So I'd I'd welcome understanding even just through this process, how we can better help ourselves do that.

Um and I the IBM IBM working with Systema Systema, excuse me, which is local, as you mentioned, but um is EPI USE is are they local?

No, ma'am, they're not.

They're not local, okay.

Um and so as we are thinking about again developing our own pool of talent in these areas so that five, 10 years, 20 years from now, we're not kind of in the same situation.

Um, what are some lessons learned about how we could better frankly include that in the contract so that we are growing our our talent pool.

I think one of the things that we can do, and I think part of it's going through the the workforce development process, getting stakeholder input, and also partnering with the small business office through kind of um vendor engagement is um trying to develop those companies.

Like, for example, we talked about Firecat here, um small local company is looking for opportunity for them to partner in projects like this.

Sistema um they did partner with three of the firms here and FireCAT carved out on their own.

But I don't have an exact answer other than going through that engagement, looking at how we train and make opportunities for them.

You know, right now we use our Seba program through the subcontracting and the prime points.

Um sometimes it's just difficult for them to compete and until we give them those opportunities, until we get it's gonna be difficult to um for them to be competitive.

Yeah, I I mean I couldn't agree more in terms of giving folks opportunities.

Um I I think it's um beyond just talking about it, though I I'd like to see on on paper what giving somebody an opportunity might might look like.

Um so councilwoman Via Gran through the um economic workforce development committee.

I I'd like to see on on paper what giving somebody an opportunity to do to compete here might look like.

And let's give ourselves you know, five-year timeline by this year, we'd like to see I don't know, X amount of expertise locally.

We've got again great companies.

I'm sure the chambers would welcome helping us better do this, supply SA, I think would also help us help us do that.

So, other than kind of you know the sentence of let's give them opportunities, let's let's put on paper what that what that might look like.

Thanks in advance, um, councilman via Gadon.

Um and just out of curiosity, just because we had the discussion on it, um, you know, we we talked about um also better understanding where we might have some outstanding um balances and in in the community.

Would something like this better help?

I would imagine so better help us, and just looking at slide five here, revenue collections, right?

So ideally now it's like you know, who who owes money to the general fund, who owes money to X, who owes money to Y, I would imagine that's now easier as a result of implementing this.

Is that right?

Some clarity.

I mean, one of the things, one of the goals I've had even with the first implementation, and Kevin back here is gonna kick me.

But one of the things I've always wanted to do is have what we call a common customer.

I want visibility across the organization as far as what one entity or one firm owns the city.

Yeah.

Very difficult to do right now because we have multiple customer accounts for DSD and Acela versus other parts of the city.

So the goal here would be to increase that transparency so we know what product or services one customer is receiving from the company, and that will give us that additional um transparency that you're asking for.

Appreciate that.

Thanks, Troy.

Councilman Corps.

Thanks, Mayor.

Thanks for this presentation.

Just a few quick questions.

Just first on the overall scoring matrices, you know, usually we see scores that are much higher than what we kind of saw in these ones.

Was there a reason why the scoring was just more rigorous or I guess like you know, in general, folks weren't getting up to the points that we expected that the highest level of points?

I think a lot of the when you look at the scoring, there's a lot of points that were embedded in Sabeta, local and veteran IBM and others, they did not receive those points just because those preference programs were not applicable.

We did look as a team in depth at the EBQ and proposed plan.

I don't think the 52 out of 60 for IBM, I think that's probably a good to an excellent score.

The other two probably are after we did the interviews, they didn't decrease a little bit because there was some clarity that we got in their proposals in terms of their experience and more specifically on the proposed plan as well.

So I think these scores reflect both their written proposals and the interviews that were evaluated by the and why did um who was the sub that for the local preference program for ENY and Accenture?

Uh Systema.

Got it, which is why they got those local preference points.

No, ENY actually and Censure actually got the local preference points because as an organization, based on our local preference program, there is a significant preference piece component to that.

And if you have 20% or more of your workforce in San Antonio or 100 employees or more, you get five points of the 10.

The um the systemic piece for um some of them would have been a requirement for the 8% subcontracting, which is a past fill, and that doesn't translate into the scores here.

Okay.

And can you help me explain like just a little bit of the difference?

Like why did um IBM's proposed plan just like supersede the other two so significantly?

IBM actually did a great job on the proposed plan.

It was very detailed and well laid out.

And even they brought us um, they brought us different examples and options in terms of how we can actually deploy the um S4 Han and Ariba.

Um they gave us options in terms of you know, you could do a mid-year, and here's the pros and cons of doing a mid-year cut over versus an end of the year cut over.

They looked at our procurement piece and actually kind of where the other companies had one, I guess I'll call it one big bang go live for Ariba, they basically split it into two where we can have, I guess, more of the technical pieces, the financial pieces versus the supplier relationship piece um delivered separate goal lives.

And that was on that um that was actually on the schedule.

You can see it under Ariba here.

So I think their proposed plan was more robust, it gave us more options, it was more detailed.

Then on the experience side, their team just had um a significant amount of experience in terms of years.

Okay, and just in terms of like what the systems can do for SAP right now, for example, our SAP does not talk to um like if you're looking at uh I don't know which exactly system this is, but if you're looking at your employee profile and you've taken leave off, the leave off does not automatically go and get deducted from your um from your account.

Is it gonna address like basic like back things like this or just front facing?

I guess I'd like to.

I mean, when you take a leave, it should automatically flow through into the payroll and two remuneration statements.

It only does if it gets approved.

Yeah, if it gets approved, yeah.

And it and it only gets approved from finance, which goes back to the initial question of like finance has to approve it, you have to submit it to the finance director, and then it gets it and it then afterwards it gets removed.

May I have to sit down with you and talk to you a little bit more in depth about it?

But it's a very nuanced question, sorry.

Are you talking about like employees?

I guess that's not how that's not how LEAVE works, but maybe Troy can follow up with you.

Yeah.

Okay.

The next question that I had is like, for example, when you're right now using XLA to make a payment for a permit, would this be connected to that as well?

Would those systems be upgraded as well?

There are interfaces in place today, and we would actually maintain those interfaces and look at improving them or enhancing them if we can.

Because one of the challenges is like the connectivity behind all of the different platforms that we're using.

And so I'm just wondering if those like so each individual interface is gonna basically say the say stay the same way it is.

It will have well when we actually implement SAP, the whole financial structure will change in terms of the charter of accounts, the financial backbone.

So those interfaces will have to be modified to keep the two systems in sync.

And we will work with IBM and also IT to have to keep those in sync.

Then there's also that additional bucket of hours for additional interfaces that we may have missed.

So the interfaces will continue, but they will need to be modified.

And some of them are interfaces, and some of them quite honestly are flat tables being shared between systems.

Yeah.

So it's all back end work, it's less of the user experience that's going to be shifting for external folks.

Well, I I want to be clear that there's a design process on the front of this.

So Melanie and her team are really leading that.

So before we just start saying technical upgrade, here's the new chart of accounts, here's the new system, how do we build the interface?

We have to go through the process design of that as well.

So we'll pick up those either process changes, whether they're for external or for internal in that design phase, and that'll give us the opportunity to reset our interfaces.

And that's in the discovery like Q2PC.

So are you guys going to do any external communications to be able to better understand what some of those challenges that folks are facing are right now?

For the suppliers specifically.

Yeah, definitely.

And that's what we mentioned on that one slide with um EWDC and the conversations we've been having with them as part of this process.

And we've been we've had conversations with our suppliers.

Um we have we know what some of their pain points are.

But this is an opportunity to dust that off, speak directly with them, look at how we modify our processes, but also if there are system considerations, we can do that as well.

Okay, great.

All right, those are all the questions I have.

Thank you so much.

Thank you, Mayor.

Uh Councilwoman Aldrada Gabito.

Thank you, um, Craig and Troy for the presentation.

Uh yeah, we know that obviously an older system can reduce productivity, which then drives up costs.

So I'm really glad and thankful that y'all are all the work done about this project.

Just a few quick questions.

What is um the expected lifespan of these upgrades?

I know it's tricky because this stuff always needs to I don't know.

Do you have a crystal ball?

Um the the standard is 10 to 15 years, but there's so much moving so fast right now we don't know how that works.

Yeah, but in general.

In general.

Okay, perfect.

Um, and what support will um we and city employees have during the transition and the deployment process.

No, that's a great question.

And as Craig mentioned, we have um Joe behind us on the OCM team.

They will partner with the IBM team on our organizational change management.

They are going to assist you know an employee all the way through the process.

In terms of employees will be involved in the testing, they will be involved in training to make sure that they're prepared.

And the team back here will make sure that that employee has the tools and the resources they need to be prepared to operate the system once we go live.

Okay, yeah.

I mean, because I know obviously, you know, and I know um Craig and I have worked together in the past.

Sometimes these big system upgrades, you know, they promise the sun, moon, and stars, but when rubber meets the road, they're often really hard to contact.

So how that's why we're here together, maybe.

Yes.

Yeah, however, we can make sure that they will be on hands and be supportive and not just in the sales pitch.

Yeah, and we um you know, a couple things to to help with that process.

And again, I talked about I think we've all done this before, and we kind of have the battle scars to show it.

Um, and the gray hair, as Eric mentioned.

Um, but in preparation for this, we have a in the budget process, we put in place a training team.

So the training team has been getting people prepared now.

They are actually going to be working with the SAP team and embedded in that training team in that SAP team to continue that training during the implementation, then post implement post-go live as well.

Awesome.

Okay, thank you, and thanks for all those work on this.

So, Craig, you said that's why you're here, right?

But so this all of this implementation is gonna dictate when you actually retire, right?

Ma'am, I have a great team.

We're gonna hold his last check, Mayor.

So yeah, it's gonna be caught up in the system.

That's where I might be the system deficiency actually.

And I have a little bit of influence on that last check, so I can actually make sure they get filled up.

Councilman Vieken.

Thank you, Troy.

I I told Councilman McKee Rider, I guess I didn't have to say anything because you brought up the SAP and the thing that we've been talking about, audit is making sure people are actually out of the system and not using the system.

When we know that they're gone, it's just we haven't deactivated them.

So I'm glad you brought that up.

Um in terms of um Mayor's request in terms of locally, you know, I know we work, and that's part of our second stage business is how we get to get some of those groups upgraded as we talk about what we're doing in these systems.

But as you both acknowledge, this is moving quite fast, and um we don't want and I'll just say it, we don't want to do what the county did.

So I'm glad to hear that we're gonna have people helping with this transition.

The other thing I'm looking forward to speaking to, of course, you about and I've already spoken to to some others uh in the assistant city manager's office, and uh I think Eric I've mentioned to you is our policy regarding AI, and when people say we have this AI um capability, is it that or is it just the assistance and knowing what the right questions are to ask, and what is the city's policy and specifically the city manager in his office, because it's really gonna be their departments that use it and department to department, how we go by and we set just general ground rules and how we're gonna use AI, how it's going to help with that efficiency because the one thing is um what I don't like to hear and as as we go into the budget session is more work on our city employees, uh, but not the compensation that they need for for doing this double work.

So I just want to make sure uh if we if we can someway, and I don't think it can be financially, but as we go through this transition, you are going to have those city employees that catch it a little faster than others, and as they help others in within their departments, kind of in that transition that we acknowledge their efforts in this process.

Because I think once we do that and we we see how people are working, we're really going to see this transition.

So I appreciate it.

I know we've been talking, it feels like a decade that we've been talking about this, and I know I feel like the police were the last to adopt uh the new because I feel like I worked on the old system when I was with the city department.

So I feel like police was last to adopt this.

So if we can also acknowledge the departments that are really working to um help with getting making sure all the their employees uh within their department are working on this.

I'd like to see that.

But thank you for the work and the effort.

I think um IBM is a good choice.

We know that their technology is gonna move with with what is trending uh on a global scale.

So uh thank you for your efforts, and I look forward to talking with you guys more on this and just making sure that we include something that acknowledges those employees that are are kind of mentoring or helping the others along in this process.

Thank you.

In case it helps anyone else, Eric, when are we due for that AI update?

I know we're doing it on some with some frequency.

You know, Mayor was just thinking about that.

It's uh on the calendar, I don't have the calendar for me.

It's either in uh it's the beginning of June.

First B session of June.

Thank you.

Councilman White.

Thanks, Mayor.

Um well, uh I'm glad we're we're sort of modernizing our uh our city's infrastructure.

Um it's it's I I guess time time to do so, and so we're giving our employees I guess some tools to do the job more effectively uh and efficiently, which ultimately is gonna lead to serving our residents um better.

And so I I I appreciate that and and thank everybody that's uh that's worked on that.

Just a couple of questions.

Um how specifically will employees across different departments experience the upgrade in in day-to-day work and what kind of efficiencies will they will they um benefit from?

Well, I think one just looking at how they interact with the system is gonna change.

I mean, it's um as I mentioned, it's a transaction-based system right now.

It's gonna be what we call the Fiore apps.

It's gonna be more modern to what you see today.

You're gonna be working with kind of common language versus it's gonna be a transaction that you have to enter to get a specific result.

Um you have the modernization of that.

You also have, I guess what else can I say?

Um take a different approach.

And my change team has really taught me this as we've gone through this.

So multiple audiences.

You're gonna have your core power users, folks in finance who do their process every single day, and they're gonna work through.

So they're gonna have access to new data, they're gonna have they're gonna have more intuitive screens, they're gonna have new design flows.

It's gonna be very different to that.

And to Councilman Via Grant's point, it's a major, it's gonna be a big retraining here.

Coming off an old archaic system to a new and a new design process.

So we have to do that.

But they're also your managers out in the departments, right?

So they may be approving timesheets, they may be doing payroll, they may be putting in um procurement requests or signing off purchase orders.

So they're gonna be more um the end users, so they're a different audience that we're gonna train to.

They're not in it every day, but they're in it for specific functions and then front end of a process in some sense.

And then they're gonna be more your casual users who might be an employee who has to enter their time or do something along that lines.

And there's also now that we have the HR success factors, and then we're gonna have now the Ariba and the S4, they start to blur together.

So if you go out today on the one COSA website internally, you'll see three work zones.

You'll see an HR work zone, a finance work zone, and a technology work zone.

That will change over time how it's set up, but that's where those everyday users will interact in that.

So they'll start to see simple forms or workflows that they've never had before.

I hope we never set in a spreadsheet or an email ever again because it's contained in the system as part of that integrated review as we go forward.

I hope that helps.

So it's it should allow their jobs to be done more easily.

Absolutely to free it free up time to do other.

Yeah, I think just simply having access to data will actually help because today we have we have some challenges with that.

Yeah.

So phases one and two went live last year.

How stable are those and any results learned from from the implementation there that can help us better implement phase three?

Phase one is live, phase two is in progress.

Phase one was success factors.

It is stable and it is operating.

Um as far as lessons learned.

I mean, anyone talk to it?

Because you were more involved than I was.

That's the audience behind me that probably give you all the real answers there.

But uh the lesson learned we had for I think from the first implementation is benefits had to go a little bit late because it was a package on a package, so we've learned better integration.

So as we talk about interfaces, in this game, we have hundreds of interfaces going forward.

So the more we can do up front around designing processes, getting agreed upon on how the new process will work and then how the systems will integrate together, the better.

Now, there's nothing against how we did it the first time.

It was just the technology of using a new benefits package with the HR packet, but they only had so much time to implement, we had to make some decisions.

So I think that's a big one.

I think governance is a good lesson learned as well.

Uh, there will be always be changes in a big program like this.

We don't have the ability with this implementation to uh implement in phases because you change your chart of accounts once, and then everything has to flow.

So the vendor had even said, hey, what if we went earlier?

What do we went late?

And the answer is you can't do either.

We have to line everything up together.

So for us, it's gonna be much more about governance and managing the changes that come.

So we're driven by time, not necessarily by um uh scope, um uh time box in that sense.

I hope that helps.

Yeah, yeah, got it.

Thanks, Mayor.

Councilmember Castillo.

Thank you, Mayor.

Thank you, Craig and Troy for the presentations and uh Dr.

Corest, um, many good questions, and I was curious about the a cellar piece as well.

Uh I'll emphasize there's so much value with the data that's entered there, and I would be hopeful if each of our constituent services office had an access to that dashboard because again, it can help streamline responses from uh two constituents rather, and then often kind of also delegate some of the load, right?

So oftentimes our constituent services team is reaching out to code enforcement officers or supervisors or animal care service to access information that if we had access to Excel that we could easily relay to residents and remove some of that workload from some of our city employees.

Um with this being presented, can you help me understand?

So while discussion was going right, I went to the city clerk's website, went to campaign finance, and the link's not working, right?

Uh, and oftentimes we hear uh in terms of like the importance of transparency when it comes to campaign finance.

Can you help me understand how this could potentially help with the dashboard or the website in terms of like the campaign finance component uh of this suggestion out of scope?

Yeah, I'll gonna have to noodle on that, ma'am.

I'm I'll have to go back and it's not directly related in that sense, and so a link on a website could be a variety of different things, so I need to go back and check on that.

Yeah, no, well, I'm not necessarily highlighting the the link not working, but in terms of uploading information and pulling information, right?

Uh I think for many West, we know how to pull the reports now, but what I often hear from members of the public is like pulling the reports and identifying information that's uploaded to the finance dashboard.

Okay.

But we can have an offline conversation about that if necessary.

I mean, I mean, a lot of times campaign finance or anything that's part of the procurement process, as we go through the design phase, we can actually look at those different pieces and look at there's an opportunity in the system to actually record that data and then how we would actually report that data and get visibility to it.

So take that as a takeaway.

Okay, that's helpful.

And then with slide four in simple terms, can you walk me through what you presented on slide four?

No one, that's your slide.

Oh success factors, upper left-hand corner was our first phase implementation.

Accenture was hired to bring in and implement success factors and uh the benefits focused component.

We implemented that early in 2025.

The SHERPA line is the OMB budget.

So that's all the budget components we're doing for OMB.

We implemented um a first phase of that as Troy talked about, but it doesn't uh fully get implemented until the S4 HANA stuff gets done at the end.

Uh and we have a system integrator helping us do that as well.

The third row is what we're talking about now.

It is the IBM system integrator implementing the S4 HANA and Ariba SAP packages.

That project is now kicked off after today, and then it comes together.

The last row is Gartner that we bring in from what we call uh oversight and quality assurance.

They are part of our governance process.

They help us with quality control, they help us with contracting, and they provide oversight across the whole program.

So the intent here is to show multiple streams in the program coming together that culminate at the end of FY27.

Does that help?

Yeah, that's helpful.

I appreciate that.

And then I'm looking at the RFP and the scoring matrix, and uh this is something I'm hopeful that we can evaluate within EWDC uh is in terms of what some of these um folks that are applied for the RFP, right?

Uh I'm I'm glad some in particular didn't get selected because of labor practices, right?

And I think it'd be helpful to understand in terms of how what percentage of their workforce is contracted labor.

Uh, and I think we should also evaluate based off of that, right?

Because I'm thinking about an article that came out in 2025 with EY.

Uh they hired a whole bunch of San Antonio residents through contracted labor and then let them go.

Um so again, right, these are residents we're then having to connect to uh rental assistants, utility assistants, so on and so forth.

So I think uh as we evaluate the RFP process, I hope that's something that my colleagues can consider in terms of what percentage of contact contracted labor um uh folks have when they're applying.

Those are all my comments.

Thank you.

Councilmember Galvan.

Thank you, Marion.

Thank you, Troy.

Um, thank you both for the the presentation today.

Um very excited to see these kind of upgrades that we're looking at here.

I won't say how old I was when this was first implemented, uh, so I'll leave that alone.

Um but I'm very excited to see the ways that we can improve our internal backend systems.

Um I think a lot of the comments that Council Record, well, I think everybody mentioned, um, were really helpful in kind of framing this a bit more for myself.

I think one of the big things, I know you mentioned, I don't know what slide it was, maybe it was slide five.

Um, it was slide yeah, it was like five.

Um talking a bit about KPIs.

I know we've kind of touched on a couple of them here and there, but I want to kind of know uh when we see that, I think to the mayor's point a bit more on paper about what is the experience gonna be for public works that they're uh procure different materials for a park development program um or for a street design or whatever may be uh or public work project overall.

Um do we have those laid out already, or are those gonna be during the discovery phase where we kind of be more during the discover and the design phase?

Okay.

Okay, that's great.

Just because I think it'd be helpful to as of course if we go forward to understand a little bit about how this will impact.

I think to counsel for White's point about how it impacts the direct service that we're providing here, right?

So it's not only a cost saving on our end and hopefully to kind of work, but also the end user experience or residents seeing that we're able to procure equipment faster and therefore uh be able to deliver the service that we're providing or deliver the project upon uh whatever park or street or et cetera.

Um just wanted to kind of know a bit about that.

For the um the stakeholder group, do we have a list of what that would look like already?

We don't have a list of who that we've been talking internally.

I don't have a list completed of them.

We're also gonna be working with supply SA, the chambers, um, a lot of the small business groups that we historically have and working with through economic development.

So we're looking at a multiple channels from being in person to surveys through WebEx or teams.

So we're trying to cast a broad net and use multiple channels.

Okay, great.

Well, glad to hear this one business one in particular.

Um, and of course, I think we've heard this conversation a lot, the employee feedback as well.

I'm thinking about any of the folks who administer uh applications that we administer through NHSD or DHS, um, understand the kind of beck in for that a bit more and how this could be impacted and hopefully, of course, improved.

Um kind of back in for that a bit more and how this could be impacted and hopefully, of course, improved.

Um, as well as anyone who goes through the procurement process for different well, of course, I know it goes through finance.

Um, but anyone who has to administer that through the different departments, whether it's parks, public works, or whoever has some of those capital needs.

Um the only other thing I was gonna ask was um for the overall cost for for this.

Do we know where that's coming from?

Is that within ITSD or finances?

Um it's part of our uh capital program.

Okay, got it.

Yeah, so as part of um we are allowed to capitalize the cost of those associated with putting software in place.

That's through our CIP.

Got it.

Okay, great.

Those are all my questions.

Thank you so much for the great presentation.

Thank you, Mayor.

Councilmember Galvan.

Um sorry, Mesa Gonzalez, thanks.

Thank you, Mayor.

Uh, thank you for the presentation.

Um, I think anything we're doing that strengthen our internal system to provide uh better experience for residents or small businesses or employees is is key.

So I appreciate all the work going into this.

Just a couple of questions on the uh slide five on the order to cash.

How does that impact residents' experience?

Do we have an idea of that yet?

Or is that more on the internal side?

The order to cash?

For how far as how it impacts who?

The the the um residence, is this for residents to for order to cash?

It's um the revenue collections.

It can be residents, it can be businesses.

So whoever uses or consumes our products or services, these will be the in these will be people that we are invoicing or collecting cash from.

So it can be either or okay.

Um and then on the slide 12, the optional fees.

Can you I guess what what makes them optional or what we really don't know if we want to actually there are options in the contract as we start going through and working with IBM.

We've had conversations around these.

I think these are just um contract additional contingency, so to speak.

So we know that in the event that we need additional app development, we have a bucket of hours.

In the event that we miss um a system interface, we can go to that.

We know we don't know exactly what our organization may look like in the end, and so we have the target operating model.

So as we go through, we start building the system and we get some more clarity, then we'll talk about through our executive steering committee meeting, working with Gardner, if these are things that we need to kind of trigger and use.

So they're just optional contract um items that we can actually lever leverage.

I I think what that supports is the um the methodology of doing the explore phase first, as opposed to we have to have everything perfectly figured out at this point, sign a fixed contract, and then we have lots of change orders that we have to manage.

So this gives us the flexibility to work through that design stage.

Okay, thank you.

Those are all my go ahead.

Honestly saying if we don't need them, then it becomes additional that goes back to the CIP.

Okay, awesome.

Thank you.

Those are all my questions.

Councilman Mungia.

Thank you, Mayor.

Um mission accomplished.

We'll make it an uneventful meeting.

Uh no.

Well, I want to keep it uneventful all the way through October 1st of 2027.

Yes, no, no, but very, very important uh contract.

And um, you know, I've seen some staff overturn and seen you know their emails kind of still be there and prevalent and people departing in the system.

I think that needs to be a little bit tighter.

So very important.

Um also I'll take the opportunity to ask have you all ever heard or spoken to this company called Tolme, T-O-L-E-M-I?

I'm not familiar with them.

No, we should get you all connected.

I've met with them yesterday in their a data company and they work contract with a couple other cities.

Uh and in their demonstration, it really was, I think uh SUC's dream come true because it was a platform where it had all this different data that you could put on there, utilities, um, a cell up, you know, SAP, all the different interfaces we have with the city, goes in the back end and on the front end is a hundred percent seamless platform that you can toggle between.

Um, and so when we try to look at, you know, separating out data points and trying to get to certain things, and and they also include information like that BCAD would have.

So I know that DSD has been with them, and that's something they're interested in, specifically for the code strategic plan.

Um, but I think as you've heard in different committees and things that we're all trying to get to some sort of level of data and run reports just on that platform without having to go to staff to run data points.

Um, I think that could be really really helpful to us.

So I kind of as we're discussing this, I thought it was a good opportunity to bring that up.

So I'll gladly take the contact and I'd be happy to talk with them.

Um I will just tell you there are hundreds of companies out there right now making very similar claims about what they can do with data.

We're just gonna have to be very clear about what our goals are and what we're trying to achieve.

So happy to talk with them.

Yeah, absolutely.

I think they've got so they're working with Fort Worth right now, New York City and some other places, and so I got to do see the demonstration, but they're happy to come and talk to us also.

It's been a huge point.

We've been talking about the education committee, right?

All this data points, and how do we kind of get to some um large platform that we can all get uh with, especially with all our utilities and different programs here.

So happy to make the connection, but I think it'd be worthwhile.

Can I make one word of warning though?

Sure.

It's only as good as our data.

Yeah, it's only as good as our data.

We've seen a couple of data um um aggregators go live here in the last couple of weeks, and they're using our public data, which is why it's out there.

We push that public data, and then it looks weird, and it's because our data wasn't correct, right?

So it's only as good as our data.

We're gonna spend a lot of time in the next several years talking about AI, but what we're really talking about is data as we go through this.

Okay, okay.

Absolutely.

That goes a long way too, I think in 311, right?

When cases are closed out uh and maybe it was done in a incorrectly, and then we get a report saying, well, you know, it's all timely, you know, that's that's a missed data point, I think.

So uh but really good to see this and and hope to see it continue on.

Thank you.

Actually, Craig, to that point though, um it's very helpful, the one pager that you gave me before I went to Kao Sheng and you talked about the uh the unified digital experience, right?

Which actually sounds exactly what Councilman Mungia is talking about.

So can you if it's different, um then if you could explain that, but if it's actually something my understanding is something you're already working on.

Yeah, so there's maybe two things side by side, just we're clear.

Um, a variety of dashboards are coming out that basically collect data, aggregate it, visualize it, and then you know we haven't done that as a city ourselves, and then you bring in CPS data and other people's data, and you get to see that in one place.

That's one thing.

Uh what the mayor is talking about is we're actually prototyping which we call it a unified environment where we can actually use AI agents to have resident interactions.

So a resident could actually interact with an agent which then hits public data, and then it has a response to that resident where they they can self-serve, where they can do that on their own, and where the data is not available, it goes through a normal channel.

But in the places where we have good data and we have good public data across agencies, the vision is a resident shouldn't have to know whether to go to the city or CPS or wherever.

They can go to an agent, ask a question about how do I do something and using that public data from multiple agencies, they're able to get an answer.

Now, maybe we don't want them to actually pay a bill at some point.

We need to figure that out, but at least the front-end interaction of that goes forward.

So we're looking at those kind of side by side, the interaction as well as the dashboard and the reporting as we go forward.

Hope that helps.

Has everyone signed up who'd like to speak on this issue, Ms.

Mills?

Okay.

Uh one final question.

On the um on the AI piece, it talks about um innovation platform, use AI, quote AI credits built into existing SAP software subscription throughout the project to learn how AI costs are metered and assessed.

So essentially this is saying, hey, how much time, how much money did we solve as a result of utilizing that program essentially?

This would be for the add-on AI we talked about, it's called Joule in the SAP.

You'll see that in a lot of their advertising.

But yes, the answer is if I have access to it and I use it 10 times a day, how much did the city just pay for that?

Great.

We have to learn how that works.

So we're gonna do that with one of our development teams so we can get that, so we can subtly say, do we want to let 14,000 employees have access to that and what's the cost of doing that?

Okay.

Yeah, super helpful.

What I'd like to understand is as part of that is you know, how do we I think it's always helpful to understand how we fare against other cities that are similarly employing this, right?

And so if there's an AI credit, they would that we or the employees, our employees, our our um uh cities employees are repeatedly not taking advantage of.

Like we'd want to understand why that is.

Right, right.

So help us it.

I don't know if that's a you know, if if it's a matter of um technical know-how or ease of finding it, but ideally, right, you'd you'd look at it and say, hey, out of a hundred points, why are we only getting 70?

Right.

Right?

So to figure to get the most out of this very expensive investment.

And on the inverse of that, ma'am, and um Copilot's a good example of that.

We could spend $300 a year for every employee to give them a desktop license of co-pilot, but you already have access to it in your MS office web thing, and then the answer is who is using it anyway, right?

So that's a good way we're watching that as well.

Yeah.

It's like who's using that gym membership that everyone's paying for.

Um exactly.

Okay.

Um thank you again.

Um the the two things I think it's related to this, uh, Craig, but if you would um and Eric, the one the digital twin.

This it's in this this same realm of like smart city stuff, right?

One, the digital twin, the status of of where that is.

I know that's not also an insignificant investment, and we can go faster if we put more dollars toward it.

That's another one where you got to invest to save money down the line, but we make smarter decisions as a result of that.

So would appreciate um I'll leave it to you to discuss with Eric if that's maybe a paper update or if that is more deserving of a full discussion here.

One because that is a significant investment.

The digital twin, and then the the item that you just described, the unified digital experience.

Um okay.

Um uh clerk, do we have folks signed up for public comment at this point?

We have three individuals signed up for public comment.

Okay, great.

All right.

Um the meeting is unless you have something else, Eric.

Uh okay.

A couple of items in exec.

Uh okay.

The time is now 317 PM on Wednesday, April 8th, 2026.

The City Council of the City of San Antonio will now meet in executive session to consult with the city attorney's office pursuant to chapter 551 of the Texas government code and to deliberate or discuss the following items.

Economic development negotiations pursuant to Section 551.087, the purchase exchange lease or value of real property pursuant to Section 551.072, and legal issues related to litigation involving the city emergency preparedness and collective bargaining, all pursuant to section 551.071.

The time is now four nineteen PM on Wednesday, April eighth, uh, two thousand twenty-six, and the San Antonio City Council now reconvene in open session.

No official action was taken in executive session.

The time is now four nineteen, and this meeting is adjourned.