Washington County Minnesota

Washington County is on the eastern edge of the Twin Cities Metropolitan area, composed of 423 square miles of land. It runs more than 40 miles in length and encompasses 468 lakes of 10 acres or more in area.  The county seat is in Stillwater, Minnesota, along the St. Croix River.

Background

Washington County is running JD Edwards EnterpriseOne 9.2 (64-bit) with 4 Purge-it! modules;
Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, General Ledger and Purchasing.

Selecting a JD Edwards Archiving Solution

After moving from JD Edwards World to EnterpriseOne some years ago, Washington County was keen to look for an archiving solution that could help get live data out of its production environment.

The archiving tool that had been used historically, generated massive PDF documents that were then saved onto a separate network drive. The organization didn’t want to continue with this archiving model.

Developing an inhouse JDE archiving tool was not a consideration for Washington County.

Purge-it! was selected as the archiving solution by Washington County government because it is integrated into EnterpriseOne. Users don’t have to go into a different looking 3rd party software to try to look up records or to view items. The Purge-it! solution is intuitive for the system users at Washington County and it’s far easier for them to access archived data in comparison to the huge PDFs that had to be searched through previously.

Dashboard Interface

With a firm focus on enhancing the user experience, Washington County finds the Purge-it! dashboards provide valuable data insights.

The team at Washington County speaks highly of the way they can review the data that’s being archived and see in advance how much data would be archived with different processing options. They can change the processing options and re-run it and then analyze it in proof, then go ahead and do it in final. Washington County is reassured by the Purge-it! easy-reversal capability, even though they’ve never needed to use it.

Washington County finds the dashboard interface makes the tasks super easy. If the system users are looking for some details they don’t see in production, the Washington County Accounting & Finance Department is confident in saying, go ahead and look for the information via the Purge-it! menus. The users don’t need to go to a different place to see the attachments. In the past, the users weren’t given access to the huge PDF documents. Instead, the Accounting & Finance Department would do the data mining if the users needed access to information they couldn’t see in the live environment. Once again, this comes down to the integration of Purge-it! in E1.

Implementation

Washington County found the Purge-it! implementation straightforward with no issues. They did the training with Klik IT on how to perform the archiving and on how to set up versions of the archives.  Klik IT recommends archiving the contracts and purchase orders first. Washington County sticks with this advice  and archives in this order.

Data Retention

Washington County can receive a large number of public information requests that must be fulfilled. With  this in mind, Washington County agreed as standard to retain 3 years of data plus current in its live JD Edwards environment. Everything older than that can be archived. The exception to this is contracts which must be kept for 10 years (that is 10 years after the last payment is made).

The intention is to maintain these retention rules by archiving every year.

Why keep what you don't need?

When it comes to data management, Washington County keeps data cleaned up and put away. They review the data integrity reports and work to have a cleaner JDE E1 system.

Data Integrity

From vouchers through to contracts and journal entries, everything Washington County handles has an attachment.  Receipts are the only exception. As a local government, they must pass annual audits, so it’s crucial that when the archiving happens in Purge-it!, those attachments stay intact. Purge-it! maintains the integrity of the archived information and Washington County keeps the connection to the attachments.

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