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Platinum CIMS Billing Application Software

When running any business, nothing matters more than knowing how much something costs. Chief financial officers, managers and customer State agencies have long wanted to know how much the various Bureau of Information Services (BIS) information technology (IT) resources cost and who consumes what percent of them!

One of the time-proven techniques for allocating IT costs has been actual usage, and until recently, the most significant cost item was CPU time. To create bills, usage metering statistics produced by the operating system were input to charge back systems. The charge back systems, in turn, spread the cost proportionally to those users that were consuming the CPU time etc. Today, BIS has dozens of major cost items (e.g. operating systems, hardware, software, databases, etc.) and several usage allocation meters.

Beginning in August 1998 the Division of Financial and Personnel Services (DFPS) and BIS began the process of installing a new system - CIMS (an acronym standing for Computer Installation Management System) for processing customer billings. The CIMS roll out will begin with the November 1998 BIS customer billings. I am the State’s project manager, and it is supported by contract programmers Paul Hassett and Phil Heinz of Platinum Technology. Elly Thompson is the technical advisor representing BIS.

CIMS is a full-featured resource accounting, cost allocation and system performance product. It tracks, allocates and /or charges for resources consumed within the BIS enterprises. An additional CIMS advantage is its versatility. CIMS may be used to invoice nearly any service or product that is now accounted for by an internal service fund. Therefore, once BIS’ billings are converted to CIMS, the migration of other DAFS billings will be underway. The new year will witness leased floor space, central warehouse products, central fleet vehicles and others DAFS systems transitioning to the same CIMS billing platform used by BIS. This common billing platform will eliminate the need to support the variety of billing processes now in place, and will provide a mechanism to minimize the monthly involvement of programmers and technicians.

The use of the CIMS central billing software is also currently being researched for use in various other departments of Maine state government. It represents a way to reduce overhead costs to departments who now maintain their own billing packages. Contact me at 287-4500 for additional information which will become available as this project is further implemented.

Larry Leugers is the assistant director of the Division of Financial and Personnel Services of DAFS.