Nevada seeks $98.8 million to finish CoreNV ERP; officials outline rollout, remaining post‑go‑live issues

Brian Bowles, director of the Office of Project Management (OPM), told the joint Senate Finance and Assembly Ways and Means committees that the state is seeking a $98.8 million one‑shot appropriation from funds remaining under AB 468 to fund the next stages of the CoreNV enterprise resource planning (ERP) implementation, which uses CGI’s Advantage 4 platform.

Bowles said the finance portion of the system went live Jan. 1 and OPM is working toward a human resources rollout now scheduled for June 30. He described the initial live period as a stabilization or “hypercare” phase, during which OPM logged 663 tier‑4 incident tickets; by the end of the stabilization period 529 of those were resolved and more than 90% were closed, canceled or scheduled for resolution.

Why it matters: The CoreNV project centralizes financial and HR data across Nevada state government and will change agencies’ business processes. Legislators pressed OPM about payroll and vendor payment delays that occurred during the finance go‑live, whether additional funding will be needed for change orders and how ongoing production support will be staffed and funded.

Bowles characterized the overall implementation pace as unusually fast, saying the team delivered a finance solution in 15 months. Quoting Timothy Goluzzi, Nevada’s chief information officer, Bowles read from a January press release that called the team’s work “nothing short of amazing,” and said other states are seeking Nevada’s lessons learned.

OPM Administrator Brady Phillips presented the detailed budget request and described the request as a single “one‑shot” appropriation to be taken from the AB 468 balance in the IFC Reserve Contingency Fund. Phillips said OPM does not request new general fund or highway fund money and intends for the office to cease to exist on July 1, 2027; ongoing production responsibilities would transition to the Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO).

Phillips identified the largest single ongoing cost the request would cover as a CoreNV production environment operations team estimated at about $5.8 million over the next biennium, which would include 18 full‑time equivalent positions (7 in year one, 11 in year two). The team would handle incoming feature releases, interim patches and the testing, stakeholder coordination and training needed before changes are rolled into production.

Bowles explained the project used a “lift and shift” or minimum viable product approach that favored out‑of‑the‑box Advantage 4 functionality over a lengthy, agency‑by‑agency business process analysis. He said that approach reduced configuration and customization time but created friction because agencies needed to change internal processes to fit the system.

On interfaces and payments, Bowles acknowledged multiple interface errors emerged during stabilization, including a pay‑file issue that prevented vendor deductions from being processed in a particular pay period. He said most problems were fixed quickly—one pay‑file fix took about 3½ to 4 business days—and OPM provided “white glove” assistance to agencies to clear pending transactions. Bowles told the committee the state processed more than $48 million in payments on the first day after going live and had processed over $2 billion total by early February.

Committee members asked about: 1) how many vendors remained unpaid (OPM said it would provide agency‑level breakout after further analysis), 2) whether payroll issues were caused by the new finance system (Bowles said the payroll function still runs on the legacy Advantage 2 instance and that some payroll problems stemmed from legacy system constraints and data entry errors), and 3) how NDOT’s implementation will be handled.

On NDOT, Bowles said the department’s use of the legacy system was more complex than other state agencies and that NDOT’s finance rollout had been moved to a new phase 1C; NDOT’s finance implementation is now scheduled for Jan. 1, 2026, six months after OPM’s HR deployment.

Budget and change control: Phillips and Bowles said change requests are ongoing. The state previously set aside $10 million in American Rescue Plan Act funds for CoreNV; Phillips said all but $185 of that was used in FY 2024 and any remaining needs for FY 2026–27 would be requested from the IFC Reserve Contingency Fund. The CGI contract includes routine vendor payments and a SaaS licensing cost currently described in testimony as roughly $5.2 million annually through the current contract term.

Staffing and governance: OPM anticipates hiring and training the 18‑person production team during the next biennium and eventually transitioning those roles to OCIO. Phillips described a slow handoff: CGI local support contractors will shoulder production support in the near term while state staff are hired and trained, then positions will be absorbed into OCIO and funded through OCIO’s rate structure in subsequent budgets.

Committee members requested: more frequent public posting of vendor status reports (OPM said vendor reports now go to the executive committee monthly and that public posting lags by several weeks for redactions and ADA remediation), an itemized list of incident tickets and a vendor‑by‑vendor accounting of unpaid invoices.

Ending: OPM officials said they will provide additional written information to committee staff on outstanding vendor payments, change request forecasts, and updated timelines for phase 2 module deployments. The committee closed the CoreNV budget hearing and moved to the Cannabis Compliance Board presentation.

"We were very lucky and successful in our first implementation," Bowles said of the finance go‑live, "but going this fast … has led to a lot of bumps and bruises along the way."