Appendix C: CAPPS Agencies’ Testimonials

Robert Snipes
Financials Leads for CAPPS
Texas Department of Transportation

CAPPS is highly configurable to fit the needs of agencies, and not all modules need to be implemented for a particular agency. The system is Web-based and operates by pointing-and-clicking, thereby making it a much friendlier interface than our mainframe system. The system is able to provide faster access to some of our information and in some cases will actually store more information than our current system.

CAPPS allows us to upload data via Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, thereby saving time when a lot of data needs to be entered. This new system is helpful for auditing and for reporting purposes because all information is located in one place and “tied together.” For us it’s going to be transformational in that I believe it will make our information more accessible and transparent and will enable us to generate some reports we weren’t able to generate from our old system.

James Bass
Chief Financial Officer
Texas Department of Transportation

TxDOT is undergoing modernization efforts, striving to improve our effectiveness and efficiency both operationally and organizationally. Critical to the success of those efforts is updating and upgrading our IT.

Our new executive director, Phil Wilson, has become fond of saying that our legacy financial systems were implemented during the first Reagan Administration. And as you might imagine, a number of limitations come with it. The expectations in the environment we all operate in today — both internally and from our external customers — has become a challenge for this 25+-year-old legacy system in meeting those demands.

We went live with CAPPS in our enterprise fund, the Central Texas Turnpike System, on Sept. 1, 2011. We haven’t gone to a full implementation to all our financials yet because we have some unique characteristics in our accounting system. We do a lot of detailed project cost accounting as a requirement of the Federal Highway Administration in order to get $2+ billion a year in reimbursement.

We recently finished a proof-of-concept involving 12 major functions we need our system to be able to deliver — and deliver well. We had some initial concern as to how much customization was needed within PeopleSoft. In the spirit of coordination and collaboration, the Comptroller’s office suggested using a process to make the staff comfortable in realizing that the ultimate solution we implemented was going to be able to meet the core requirements we definitely need.

As we move forward, we look forward to working with both the Comptroller’s office and the other agencies to secure additional funding we need from the Legislative Budget Board so we can fully implement Financials at TxDOT.