Board of Governors Accept PASSHE Presidents' Alternate SIS Plan
At their October meeting the BOG accepted a proposal for an alternate plan to implement student information systems (SIS) at all 14 campuses and to discontinue the move to SAP's Student Life Cycle Management software. Since April, 2008 the Council of Presidents with the aid of campus chief information technology officers (CITO) developed a rational and justification for this change in SIS implementation.
Student Life Cycle Management Functional Review
Bloomsburg University hosted a workshop consisting of a functional review of SLCM and an actual demo of the recruiting and admissions subsystems for eastern region Phase II and Phase III universities.
New Implementation Schedule...New Name
A new proposed implementation schedule was presented to the Council of Presidents this day. Please click here to review the new schedule. Also SAP has rebranded the name of its student information system product from "Campus Management" to "Student Life Cycle Management (SLCM)". Notice that SyTEC has now determined the implementation will proceed in three phases, of which Lock Haven University is in Phase 2.
PASSHE Board of Governors Reaffirms the SAP Campus Management Project
In a message to the university presidents Vice Chancellor of Administration and Finance James Dillon stated, "...the IT Committee of the BOG stands on the continuation of the implementation of the integrated ERP system utilizing SAP software. After a great deal of due diligence the IT Committee has reaffirmed an earlier decision to implement an integrated system, in a single instance, using SAP software. During this period of study the project implementation of the campus management component has been in a holding pattern awaiting a final decision. We at SyTec are aggressively mobilizing staff and resources to reenergize the implementation project; therefore, you will see a great deal more university engagement as we ramp up effort. We collectively have a great deal of work to accomplish in a very short time frame to reconfirm the project plan including scope, time lines, benchmarks and budget. Part of the reenergizing process is also an opportunity to reengineer the governance, reporting, and communications models utilized so we can optimize the implementation outcomes..."
The Office of Human Resources is pleased to announce the arrival of a new web-based service called Employee Self Service (ESS) that will provide Lock Haven University employees with information related to their employment. Through ESS, employees will be able to log into a secure server and view information from the Human Resources/Payroll System including: current and historical pay statements benefit plan coverage, contributions and covered dependents; applicable bank information; retirement and savings plans contributions; and leave balances and usage. For additional information go to HR's ESS web page.
Student Employee Time Entry (eTime) Goes Live
This web-based system, developed by Mansfield University and tested by Kutztown University, allows student to enter their campus employment work times into a central server based in Harrisburg. The PASSHE has endorsed the system and has assumed system support from Mansfield. Lock Haven was one of the first implementers; with all universities expected to participate in the future. This is a non-SAP system; however, time-entry data collected and approved here is imported into the SAP HR Payroll system in order to produce paychecks for our students. The new system allows students to enter their time anytime within a pay period and allows timekeepers to approve or deny those entries at a time convenient to them.
PASSHE Active Directory Populated to Parallel LHUP's Active Directory
In preparation for the rollout of the student employee eTime system in August and Human Resource's Employee Self-Service (ESS) in early November, faculty, staff, and student account names were exported to the directory server that covers the entire PASSHE user community. The main purpose for establishing this user directory is to authenticate individuals at campuses across the system to access the above services as well as future services.
Revised Campus Management Timeline for Phase I Universities
The anticipated Phase I rollout for Cheyney, East Stroudsburg, Kutztown, and Shippensburg.
Campus Management (CM) Project Changes
Recently at a PASSHE Board of Governor's Information Technology Subcommittee meeting it was decided to reorganize the project. Briefly the following changes were put forth:
The contract for the project management consulting firm, Unisys, was not renewed.
The CM implementation will be completed by the 2009-2010 academic year for all PASSHE universities.
The implementation will occur in three phases, instead of the previous two phases.
The phase one universities will be: Cheyney, East Stroudsburg, Kutztown, and Shippensburg; previously, seven universities were in phase one, including Lock Haven.
The CM system will be implemented centrally at the PASSHE System Technology Consortium (SyTEC) shared services center in Harrisburg.
Production System Upgrades
As part of the routine maintenance cycle of the SAP Production System SyTEC will start a Support Pack upgrade on Friday, October 7, 2005. This work should be transparent to you but is necessary for SyTEC to keep the system current for fixes, legal changes and modifications. Their plan is to initiate the work required over the next 30 days with the support packs being applied to Production system the weekend of November 11th. During this period SyTEC will "freeze" all changes to the system and will address any “emergency’ requirements on a situation by situation basis.
Campus Management Update
The State System implementation will be the first for SAP Campus Management where a single client is being used to support multiple entities. A client is a single copy of the software with a common database which all universities will share. This is similar to how the Financial (FI) and Human Resource (HR) system was implemented. SyTEC has made a decision to establish a limited proof of concept to test out this approach. We expect the Proof of Concept project to be complete by August 15th.
The teams have identified basic core functionality within each of the functional areas that is necessary to support a first time undergraduate student life cycle. Although we are using the best business practices identified through blueprint from all 14 universities, we are currently configuring only three: California, Kutztown and Shippensburg. This does not imply that we are reducing the number of Phase One schools. We simply need to know that we can configure core functionality for this limited scope at multiple universities in a single client environment while still being able to adequately segregate data. As a result of this effort, we anticipate that we will be able to determine how much development work will be necessary to accommodate our needs.
In addition to configuring the system, SyTEC staff is reviewing the requirements to determine to what extent and in what areas we might be able to move towards standardization and commonality. The SyTEC Executive Board met on Wednesday, June 22, 2005, at the Dixon University Center. The most significant outcome of the meeting was the agreement by the Board to play a lead role in weighing the cost/benefit of maintaining (and thus configuring) unique approaches to the same business process. We have determined that some of the differences in University policies and procedures will have an impact on configuration and ongoing operational support. The SyTEC staff is preparing to present these issues and their possible cost impacts to the SyTEC Executive Board for review.
Additionally, we are reviewing specific requirements in the Blueprint document to ascertain if any may be deferred (not permanently eliminated). No decisions will be made arbitrarily, but we must get a sense of what requirements could be deferred without disrupting the core student life-cycle process. These deferral requests will also be sent to the SyTEC Executive Board for a decision.
With that being said conference calls for the Admissions and Recruitment, Student Administration and Student Financials teams will be on hold until after the beginning of the fall 2005 semester. SyTEC team leads will be in contact with the functional teams on the campuses to schedule future calls.
FINANCIER Update
The Financial Aid Team is involved in the SAP August 15th project on a more limited basis than the other teams as Wolffpack’s FINANCIER software is a per-configured system which is already in production in a single client, multi-university environment. The team is continuing to work to prepare for the FINANCIER implementation and will be in contact with the campus financial aid teams as needed.