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ST. LOUIS — ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ Lambert International Airport was perilously close last month to greeting travelers with overflowing trash cans and dirty restrooms.

The airport hadn’t been paying its cleaning contractor, Regency Enterprises Services, on time. And Regency’s owner, Charles Brown, was days away from missing payroll.

“If I hadn’t gotten a check by that Wednesday, we would not have had anybody in there Friday morning,� Brown said in an interview.

Brown had already maxed out his lines of credit and was bleeding money in interest costs to pay the 130 or so custodians his firm employs to keep the airport clean under Regency’s three-year, $30 million contract.

Brown was desperate, so he and his lawyer told the city that they wanted out. They gave their 120-day notice to terminate the contract on Feb. 1.

That got City Hall’s attention. He met with Lambert brass and staff from ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ Mayor Tishaura O. Jones’ office, he said. The city officials scrambled and got his monthly invoice paid that Wednesday. Brown made payroll, and the custodians showed up to work cleaning the city-owned airport that Friday.

“When I went to them last month, I’d extended every resource I had,� Brown said. “That would have put me out of business if they hadn’t made that payment.�

Regency is not the only contractor getting paid late. Lambert, one of the city’s largest operations, is hustling to catch up on a backlog of vendor invoices as it struggles to sync up its new accounting system with the one at City Hall.

The payment delays at Lambert come as similar issues tied to staff turnover and a new accounting system in the city’s independent finance department — run by the elected ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ comptroller, Darlene Green — ripple across various departments.

Lambert’s problems, while related, are heightened by the airport’s decision to migrate to its own accounting and procurement system using Microsoft Dynamics 365 rather than the Oracle platform the comptroller’s office and the rest of City Hall began using in March 2022.

And while the airport’s leader said Regency’s payment delays were tied to other factors, the problem surfaced as Lambert’s staffers were busy dealing with issues related to the new payment systems.

Airport Director Rhonda Hamm-Niebruegge acknowledged the airport is taking longer to pay its vendors since it began using Microsoft Dynamics in July. But she said the airport staff is coming in on weekends and is “all hands on deck� to get Dynamics integrated with the city’s new Oracle payment system, a process she hopes is complete by early next year.

“We do know there are some very frustrated vendors because it’s taken a while,� Hamm-Niebruegge said in an interview. “We hope that our integration of Microsoft Dynamics into Oracle is coming in the near future. There’s just a handful of bugs they’re still working on.�

‘Pointing the finger at each other’

The new payment systems — known in business jargon as Enterprise Resource Planning, or ERP — are replacing ones that the airport and City Hall have used for decades.

While the new systems are upgrades from the legacy programs the city and airport used previously, their rollouts are causing headaches for vendors who could think twice about doing business with the city again, potentially reducing competition and raising costs.

Not only do Lambert officials and their finance staff need to review and approve vendor invoices, but the comptroller’s office at City Hall also must approve them. That office has been working out the kinks of its new Oracle accounting system since it was switched on in March 2022.

The processing of invoices has been slowed both in Lambert’s new system and when they reach the comptroller’s office, Hamm-Niebruegge said.

“It’s both, but I can’t throw the blame all their way,� she said. “We have our own.�

Brown, at Regency, said some of his invoices were delayed by two months or more. The airport told him the accounting department downtown — Comptroller Green’s office — wasn’t processing his invoices because the airport accounting staff needed to reconcile his employees’ time clock punches. Downtown told him that, no, all the airport had to do was sign off that his firm actually did they work and they would approve it.

“Everybody was kind of pointing the finger at each other,� Brown said.

Hamm-Niebruegge said the slow payments to Regency weren’t solely related to the new payment systems. She said the bulk of the issue with Regency was that the company upgraded its own time clock system, and that didn’t sync up with how the airport tracked the work hours of Regency employees and paid the company’s invoices.

“That all happened at the same time the Microsoft Dynamics crossover happened, too,� Hamm-Niebruegge said. “It wasn’t purely the crossover of Microsoft Dynamics. There were some other things going on.�

Because of Regency’s new time clock system, airport staff had to go through Regency’s employees “name by name� to validate their check-ins, which “was taking our staff 40 hours a week to do an invoice,� Hamm-Niebruegge said.

“That’s been rectified, and the bills are being paid consistently now for him,� she said. “It was frustrating for them, and it was frustrating for us.�

Regardless, other vendor invoices have been delayed weeks to a month beyond the airport’s usual payment cycle of 30 to 45 days, she said. The problem is often that Lambert accounting staff don’t realize that invoices are lingering as they and their consultants work to migrate data to the Dynamics system.

“If someone’s not paid, until they raise their hand, we don’t always know,� Hamm-Niebruegge said.

The reason the airport is using a different system than City Hall, which still must approve its payments, is due to timing, Hamm-Niebruegge said. Lambert put out its request for proposals for a new accounting system before the city, which issued its RFP for the new system back in 2019.

“We went out prior to the city making a decision if they were going to update,� she said. “Our system was an in-house and it was dying. We were extremely concerned, not knowing exactly the timeline of the city. We just had to do something because we felt like ours was going to die any day.�

She said the airport had already picked Dynamics when the city decided in 2020 to go with Oracle. Lambert then had to slow its adoption of Microsoft Dynamics to wait for the city to implement Oracle, which is why the airport didn’t turn on its new system until July.

Even though it waited for the city to switch to Oracle, Hamm-Niebruegge said Lambert still wanted to go with its own system.

“The city’s needs are probably a little different than ours are,� she said.

Brown, at Regency, said he is waiting to see if Lambert is going to keep paying him on time. He’s got an invoice for his October services pending that he needs before the end of the month. And he wants to renegotiate some protections in his contract and get the city to make him whole for the interest costs he incurred borrowing money to make payroll.

“I can’t go through that again; I won’t be able to go through that again,� Brown said. “My plan is to continue the contract if they pay on time. If they miss any payment on time between now and Feb. 1, we’re gone Feb. 1.�