Board Chair Reacts to ERP Fiasco that Led to Cirrana Investigation

BRADENTON – On Monday Manatee County Schools Deputy Superintendent Ron Ciranna was put on leave as the district launched an internal investigation related to possible unauthorized expenditures regarding the district's Enterprise Resource Planning project, which suffered costly delays that saw its budget more than double before finally going live last month.

Ciranna inherited the much-beleaguered project when he came on in late 2016, having been hired from Pinellas County following deputy superintendent Don Hall’s departure. Originally said to cost no more than $10 million, the price ballooned to more than twice that by the time it finally went live on July 1, some 17 months past its original launch date.

School board chair Scott Hopes, who has extensive ERP experience in the healthcare field, immediately began questioning the district's implementation of the vastly complex information system that integrates and automates a vast array of procedures for which the district had previously had antiquated and sometimes incompatible processes.

"This investigation is in an early stage and Mr. Ciranna will have a full opportunity to respond to the concerns as part of the investigation and no conclusions regarding the program or Mr. Ciranna should be drawn until all the facts are in,“ Hopes said in an email statement after Ciranna was suspended. "The district’s commitment is to ascertaining the facts in a fair and impartial basis as quickly as is possible."

Hopes said in the email that the investigation related to "payments and scope of work related to the ERP process that may not have gone through proper authorization."

Hopes said on Thursday that the school district had made a number of errors throughout the process that exacerbated an already complicated endeavor, most notably failing to hire personnel with a familiarity with implementing such systems and/or contracting with a firm to manage the transition.

"The system went live on July 1, and the training materials had not been written because the business processes to utilize the new system had not been developed," said Hopes. "Somewhere along the line a decision was made, I believe under Dr. Greene's tenure, to not contract with (the vendor) or a firm that had done this before. To save money, our existing people would write the business processes and the training materials, people who have never used this system. Many of the people had never used an information system beyond Microsoft Office."

Hopes said even though the board approved funding for a number of employees to assist with the integration after he brought it to the other member’s attention in an executive session, nearly all of the positions remain unfilled. He added that had the focus been limited to the four or five modules that were actually needed and the proper personnel had been in place, the project may have been able to have been completed for the original $10 million, even after the decision to incorporate Manatee Technical College was made.

"Somehow, there was a significant scope of work expansion that not only added MTC, but added a number of modules that required an organization of much more complexity, of international scope, dealing with multiple world currencies in order to benefit from those modules," explained Hopes. "That is not the School District of Manatee County."

Hopes said that he believed the lack of experience within the team made it easy for the vendor to oversell unneeded products.

"What we ended up with was a project where the scope crept far beyond the organization’s capacity to not only implement it, but to even be able to utilize it."

Hopes, who'd been on the board of trustees for USF, was appointed to the school board by the governor in July of last year following Karen Carpenter’s retirement. Later this month, voters will decide between him and three other candidates for the seat's next four-year term.