Tracking Faculty Vacation in IRIS
Karen Combs and Lisa Wilson initiated a request to accrue faculty vacation in IRIS. President Todd and Provost Subbaswamy support the proposal. Michelle Bliffen reported that the same process used for staff vacation records will be employed and the implementation is expected to take two-three months because of the complex interaction with FES. A new quota type and a new absence type will be created as part of this project.

Plant Maintenance and Inventory Update
Ben Crutcher shared several highlights and achievements with the committee:

--After one month of Go Live activity, there are 49,075 work orders in the system, with charges of $1.5 million (predominately in Housing, Medical Center PPD, and Capital Project Management).
--The system is working well and settlement likewise is working as it should.
--There are 19,000 pieces of Medical Center equipment in the system, all of which have been identified for the automated preventive maintenance plan.
--Housing plans to begin an equipment inventory and maintenance plan set-up in late summer.
--Procurement card usage is being monitored. The goal is to bring this kind of activity into Purchasing (with use of standing orders) and move to just-in-time inventory.
--Bar code readers are working well.

Campus Management Update

Financial Aid. Award letters for law students are in the mail, with packaging, creation of letters, and mailing completed on June 6. Returning students and new graduate students will be receiving a post card, rather than a letter, with directions to go to the web site to review and accept awards. Students can also decrease load amounts on the web site.

Student Accounting. On June 1, the team generated 7,000 account statements and sent them both in paper form and as e-mail. Within an hour of receiving the e-mail, more than 50 students had paid their fees. Fee calculation is running each night and the team is working on direct deposit for refunds.

Student Administration. The issues with transcripts have been resolved. CM Team members will be assisting with the summer advising conferences which begin on June 18 and run for five weeks. Michelle Nordin is now working regularly with Admissions staff and hopes to establish the same set-up with the Students Records area.

BPS Update

Budget Preparation. The 2007-08 operating budget preparation is complete. The budget presentation to the Board of Trustees was made today.

Final Preparation. Salary proposal entry for non-regular employees occurs after the budget process is complete. Units are currently working in BPS to enter these salaries and the process is going well.

BPS Support. The BPS Team is assisting users with open labs. One has been held and two more are planned for June 12 and 13. Users also will benefit from recent system modifications made to improve processing time and minimize server locks.

Retraction. The team is testing four programs to be used for retraction (loading the budget and salary information into R/3 from BPS).

Reporting Update
Current BW Team efforts are focused on the following: GASB enhancements and reports for year-end, grants issues, reports for IPEDS and CPE, structures and reports for the Position Budget Control replacement, and the stat file. A BW consultant found a way to print from the web without downloading information to Excel.

The team is making headway with CM reporting. There are 62 CM structures in place and 21 reports completed, along with 34 interim solutions for reports. Departments have submitted 40 requests for CM reports. Don Witt will help set priorities for CM reports. Seven-full-time UK employees and four consultants are assigned to CM report development.

Oracle Project
Frank Butler has instructed the IRIS Project Team to initiate a project to download data to Oracle for ad hoc reporting. While Business Warehouse has certain strengths, it lacks flexibility for changing data models. Structures were put in quickly without robust requirements, with the consequence of having to rebuild data if data models are changed. Power users on campus need more flexibility for ad hoc reports and BW offers no quick solution.

The move to Oracle is not a “quick fix” solution. The project will require considerable effort and additional personnel resources. Several issues have surfaced, including the matter of security and organizational structure. Users will still need to learn the data in IRIS.

Committee members received a project proposal/timeline for review and consideration. Data will pull from Business Warehouse, since the logic lies in the extractors for BW. The project will begin with FI, to be followed by HR, and then BPS and MM. CM will be added when it is stable.

Information Technology will maintain the Oracle environment and assist with training and support.