Idaho experiencing fewer calls for help transitioning to new Luma business system

Launched July 1, Luma is a cloud-based enterprise resource planning system that all state agencies and all state employees use. Everything from budget, procurement, finance, human resources, to payroll systems and more is standardized through Luma. 

Compared to the first week of Luma’s launch in July, finance and supply chain management requests are at 40% of the number from the system’s first week. And human capital management requests are at 57% of the week 1 totals, Whitworth said.

“Things are kind of leveling out and getting better,” Whitworth said in an interview. 

Whitworth said those numbers reflect all instances of state agencies and employees reaching out to the Idaho State Controller’s Office for assistance and range from routine donated leave requests to a report of a problem with the system. Overall, Whitworth estimated that two-thirds of the requests are for an explanation of how to do something. 

Because of the scale of change involved, it could be next summer before state employees and agencies have developed a high level of expertise in the massive new system, Whitworth said. 

And despite the progress, some agencies and employees continue to face challenges implementing the Luma system.

In November, the state double-paid more than $32 million in Idaho Department of Health and Welfare payments and benefits after more than 3,000 transactions from Nov. 27 were duplicated the following day, the Idaho Freedom Foundation reported on its website. 

The duplicated Idaho Department of Health and Welfare transactions were caused because of a timing issue, not a systems problem with Luma, Whitworth told the Idaho Capital Sun on Monday.

Whitworth said the timing error was limited to the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare and did not affect other state agencies. In response, the Idaho State Controller’s Office has added additional time into its processes to avoid the problem happening again, Whitworth told the Sun.

“We have recovered the majority of the funds to date and will fully recover the remaining amounts in time,” Whitworth said in a written statement Monday.

The Idaho Legislature approved the transition to the new business system in 2018 through House Bill 493, estimating that the project would cost $102 million spread over seven years. 

Luma replaces a pair of old state legacy systems that dated to 1987 and 1988 and had surpassed their useful lifespan and were vulnerable to security and infrastructure threats.

Whitworth has called the transition the largest reengineering of business systems in state history. 

After Luma’s launch, data entry and process errors hampered the rollout and frustrated some employees and state legislators who experienced difficulty transitioning to the new system. Some of the fallout included state officials being unable to produce for three months the historic and comparative revenue reports that state legislators and the public use to verify revenue collections that the state budget is built around. 

An eastern Idaho nonprofit called Island Park Sustainable Fire Community also reported that it endured months of delays in receiving state grant payments after state employees attributed part of the delay to difficulties transitioning to Luma. Whitworth previously told the Sun there were several factors that went into the delayed grant payments. The Idaho Department of Lands was also experiencing turnover with grant and finance positions at the department and there was an additional delay to verify documents, Whitworth said. 

One of the issues affecting rollout was uneven training among state employees and state agencies. In November, a report released to the Legislative Council showed that fewer than 50% of state employees had completed basic Luma training before the system launched July 1. That means many state employees and agencies were learning the system on the job as they attempted to file and generate their reports and tasks. 

Although the data entry and process errors have generated publicity, Whitworth said Luma provides several important security and modernization benefits that get overlooked amid the transition. 

The system features enhanced security benefits that Idaho’s vintage 1980s systems lacked, including two-factor authentication and a cloud-based network that protects Idaho’s business systems from infrastructure failure or natural disasters that could have taken a physical data center or server offline in an emergency. 

Luma also promises greater transparency in Idaho government by standardizing business practices between agencies and electronically linking documents together like receipts, purchase orders and contracts together rather than having each of those records housed or stored separately, Whitworth said.