By Dr. Michael Conlon, UF Director of Data Infrastructure and PeopleSoft Implementation Officer

As the University continues the work of adopting new business processes and new business systems, choices have to be made regarding the initiatives that will receive immediate attention.

Working with the senior vice presidents, the provost, and vice presidents of research, finance and administration and human resources, an agenda has been developed to move the university forward. Eight major initiatives have been identified. In this column we'll cover four of the eight. Next month we will continue the descriptions.

First, the collection of reports needs to be improved. A task force of financial leaders from across campus has identified reports to be produced and modifications to existing reports. The new report collection will support the basic business processes of reconciliation, review, approval and accounting for the university's money across both appropriated funds and cash based funds. The new reports will be available by the first of the year.

Second, the data warehouse must be available in a timely manner. Data from the business systems has taken as long as five days to make its way to the warehouse. This will soon be reduced to two days -- a new warehouse will be available every other day. Later this fiscal year work will be completed to build a new warehouse every day.

Third, a new system will be implemented for grant billing. The current processes are manual and time consuming. It is critical to the university that grant billing be timely, accurate, efficient and consistent across all grant offices. Using common processes and an integrated system, the university will have complete records of grant billing and reports on billing activity. The new system will be ready for use in September 2006.

Fourth, changes will be made to time and labor to simplify time entry, time review and time approval. Changes will be made to the screens to aid time entry. Approvers will see only the people for whom they approve time. Former employees will no longer appear on time entry and approval screens. These changes should significantly improve the time and labor processes and cut down on the errors that must be corrected for each payroll.

The eight strategic projects are joined by many other projects to improve the system. Bridges makes between ten and twenty system improvements every week. Many of these go unnoticed as they reduce error rates, improve processing speed or provide specific corrections to processes.

In addition to these improvements, Bridges is making changes to its supporting systems to improve system response time, make the system easier to manage, and reduce operating costs.

Next month we’ll introduce four additional large scale initiatives. For further information about Bridges projects, please see the Bridges web site at www.bridges.ufl.edu .

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