September 2016 Activity Report | Business Systems

Business Systems

My UD Business

Since My UD Business launched in spring 2015, the site has had over 350,000 visits. My UD Business is a service maintained by IT-WD that helps students, staff, faculty, and even parents easily search all of the University of Delaware’s 700+ forms and then conduct their University of Delaware business. IT-WD continues to work closely with business form and application owners to continuously improve the content and usability of My UD Business. Try it! Go to www.udel.edu/myudbusiness.

Blue Hen Planner improvements

IT-WD teamed up with the Office of the University Registrar to build a homegrown schedule planning tool for students. The new planning tool has more features and integrates more smoothly into our existing registration system than any commercial products on the market. The Blue Hen Planner was released in April 2016, just in time for student registration for fall 2016 classes. With the Blue Hen Planner, students can

quickly and easily explore thousands of possible schedule combinations.
determine their enrollment eligibility for specific courses and sections prior to registration.
find and save preferred schedules ahead of their registration appointment.
import saved schedules directly into WebReg to greatly streamline the registration process.

Students can further refine their schedule options by excluding recurring blocks of time from their schedule for work or other weekly activities and by pinning or excluding specific course sections. The Blue Hen Planner helps students discover their ideal schedules while simultaneously expediting enrollment in their courses.

Calibrations added to the Performance Appraisal system

IT-WD partnered with the Office of Human Resources to develop a new calibration feature in the Performance Appraisal system. Performance calibrations allow employees and supervisors to assess and document progress towards the goals set during the annual appraisal. Goals may be modified or added at any time during the appraisal year. HR recommends a review of performance goals several times throughout the year. HR announced the calibration feature to UD employees on July 15, 2016.

Application for Undergraduate Readmission enhancements

IT-WD recently partnered with the Office of the University Registrar to improve the process for undergraduate readmission. The new process feeds the application form into Web Forms to take advantage of existing routing and audit trail capabilities. The application is automatically routed to the appropriate college for final decision, and the Registrar's office is notified. For more information about this form or the approval process, contact the Office of the University Registrar at registrar@udel.edu or (302) 831-2131.

Faculty180 update

Over the past two years, IT Management Information Services (IT-MIS) has been working with the Provost’s Office, the Research Office, and other collaborators to implement Faculty180, an application that migrates the University’s manual, paper-based faculty evaluation processes to a secure, cloud-based environment. Over the spring and summer, IT-MIS developed an interface from PeopleSoft Financials to Faculty180 to provide current and pending grant information, including “person efforts” per year committed to each project. IT-MIS has developed views that allow the Research Office to validate proposal and award data sent to Faculty180.

Financial systems updates

IT-MIS worked with the University Cashier’s office to put together an RFP to implement the PeopleSoft Cash Management module. The RFP was released to selected vendors on Aug. 24.
IT-MIS has automated the manual process used by the Office of the University Controller to produce reports of balances that need to be corrected. The new report includes general ledger data that needs correcting and relevant information from the general ledger scrub table, thereby reducing further data manipulations in Excel.
IT-MIS moved all Financials test database instances into the new SuperCluster server for better performance. This is a step towards moving all the Financials systems to the new SuperCluster.
IT-MIS created a process to incorporate information about student advisors into several Student Financials tables and forms, particularly the Student Funding Allocation Form.
Enhancements to the Salary Obligations process for the PeopleSoft Labor Allocation Module have been completed. The enhancements improve methods used to calculate obligations for specific fund types and salary admin plans.
IT-MIS developed a process that uses shell scripts to encrypt and decrypt files on the Financials file server. This process improves the security of University financial information.
General billing invoices have been modified per U.S. Office of Management and Budget’s Uniform Guidance regulations to include certification text.

HR system updates

Grad On/Off: In an effort to reduce the number of JED's that departments and HR have to process during peak times, the applications that support updating graduate students’ terms, funding, and titles were streamlined this summer.
Dependent Coverage Process: In June, IT-MIS and HR Benefits created a new report that shows what dependents have been added or removed from an employee’s coverage throughout the year, especially during open enrollment.
Auto Termination Process: IT-MIS, HR, and Payroll created a new process for finding employees in the Semi-monthly Other (SOT) and Bi-weekly Other (BOT) categories who have not been paid in 12 months. If the SOT and BOT employees are retirees, the process will mark their action reason (AR) as “Terminated: rehired retiree.” Otherwise the AR will be “Terminated: completion of contract.” A report of those being terminated, including counts for both categories, will be sent to each department.
System upgrades: IT-MIS is working with the HR and Payroll departments on the next upgrades to the PeopleSoft HR system (version 9.2) and PeopleTools (version 8.55). The upgrade project is scheduled to be completed at the end of October. More information will be provided once the date for the upgrades is scheduled.

Budget Turnaround application improvements

Several key enhancements were made to the Budget Turnaround (BTA) application for the annual budgeting process. Chief among these enhancements was creating a new “Allocated & Restricted Funds” section to support the new all-funds budgeting/reporting initiative. Other key enhancements included   enabling users to download their data in spreadsheet format  and implementing a finer-grained categorization of budget data so that users receive the most accurate and relevant budget information possible

The Budget Office worked with IT-WD on the definition and testing of these improvements. The new BTA process was released in May 2016.

RFS UMS Web Form improvements

The Request for Service: University Media Services Web Form was updated as the result of collaboration between IT-UMS, General Accounting, and IT-WD. The updated form uses responsive design, allowing it to be used effectively on any device. The form also incorporates UD’s new CFS Component, an improved method for gathering chartfield information. The CFS Component, being implemented in many of the University’s Web Forms and applications, makes it easier for users to find SpeedType and Account codes and lets users that have accounting shortcuts select existing shortcuts to populate the CFS Component automatically.