As enterprises go, states are up there with the big ones, so Ohio’s deployment of a statewide capital project management system integrated with its enterprise resource planning system is significant.

“We seem to be breaking new ground,” says Fred B. Holcomb, fiscal officer for the state architect’s office. “No other state seems to have done a statewide implementation of construction management software and interfaced it with a statewide ERP.”

Ohio’s PeopleSoft-based ERP system, called the Ohio Administrative Knowledge Services, was originally envisioned to manage capital programs, as well as financial, human resources, payroll, procurement and fixed asset management. But after the state scoped its construction program needs, it picked a tool from Skire Inc., Menlo Park, Calif., called Unifier. It is a platform for centralizing program management in a relational database accessed through web browsers. Implementation began in mid April

“It’s a complex deployment,” says Sateez Kadivar, Skire’s vice president of business operations. The system will have a project portal for architects, bidders, and project participants, but also a top-down view for the whole-state perspective. A new feature is a funding manager designed to help public-sector clients track mixed sources on a given job. He says typical implementations roll out “chunks” of process in phases, but some, like Ohio’s, take “the big bang” approach and go live all at once. That takes a lot of preparation. “We still have a long way to go,” he says. “They are not looking to go live until next year, in June.”