Case Study: City and County of San Francisco achieves 7‑hour payroll reduction and improved continuity with Oracle Engineered Systems

City and County of San Francisco Shortens Payroll Processing by Seven Hours, Ensures Business Continuity, and Reduces Total Cost of Ownership

The City and County of San Francisco, which supports more than 30,000 employees and an $8.5 billion operating budget, needed to modernize its PeopleSoft human-capital systems to reduce risk, complexity, and cost. Key challenges included moving to a tier‑one production data center with a geographically separate disaster‑recovery site, replacing end‑of‑life servers with a standardized, scalable architecture, improving online and batch performance to shorten payroll cycles, eliminating single points of failure, automating routine tasks, and enabling real‑time reporting.

San Francisco deployed Oracle Exadata and Exalogic eighth‑racks in production and a DR/test center 100 miles away, upgraded to PeopleSoft 9.0, and implemented Oracle RAC, Enterprise Manager and GoldenGate to standardize and protect HCM environments. The result: biweekly payroll time fell from 24 to 17 hours, administrators supported twice as many environments and quadruple the servers without head‑count increases, more than 50 servers were consolidated while PeopleSoft instances grew from 15 to 36, server deployments dropped from months to under a day, and overall availability, productivity, and total cost of ownership improved.

City and County of San Francisco

Ana Contreras

Technical Manager, eMerge