Financials Status Report January 12, 2004

Transcription

1 Summary Financials Status Report January 12, 2004 Last week was our first back from the university-wide holiday break. The Financials team put a major emphasis on development, which will conclude at the end of January. The development team presented a template to collect interface parameters to begin mapping source and target systems, tables, and fields. The teams will aggressively work to complete this information while the developers make final updates to the interface programs. The Financials team also collected all of the processes that each application will run on some schedule (i.e. daily, weekly, ad hoc, etc). This will facilitate the set up of AppWorks, which is software that will manage PeopleSoft s processes. We also collaborated on our plan to apply recent PeopleSoft fixes and patches to our various modules. There are timing considerations since you would ideally wait until the end of development to apply patches in order to reduce the number of testing iterations. Additionally, you want to apply as many patches as you can to stay current before freezing the database prior to final go-live procedures (like training and migration to production). Training The first phase of training ended in December, and the training team completed seven weeks of training sessions. This team is currently working on some training scheduled for the end of January and setting up a pilot instance early next month. The first phase of this pilot will allow some campus users to enter pre-award transactions in PeopleSoft. Interdepartmental Transfers Due to the university s requirements and business practices for interdepartmental transfers; we will use PeopleSoft s Purchasing and Payable functionality, which will facilitate encumbering funds and relieving those encumbrances with a journal voucher that moves cash and P&L activity between the Sourcing and Receiving departments. We are using these terms instead of Charging and Benefiting to avoid confusion and promote standard terminology for all purchasing and payable transactions. The ID Transfer process will allow for R2E (i.e. revenue to expense) and E2E (i.e. expense to expense) transfers. This team met with Business Services and Information Systems (IS) concerning the ID encumbrances for postage. Currently, their billing to departments is handled by a program within IS. As the current Pitney Bowes system is limited to only 10 characters for an encumbrance number and PeopleSoft's encumbrance Page 1 of 5

2 number is 15 characters we are working on a solution to run a translation of information back and forth. After the initial meeting, all parties are going back for more information and we will meet again in a week for more discussion. Procurement Card The PCard team continued to focus on finalizing the design specifications. A conference call was completed with the UF comptroller s office, MBNA implementation team, and the UF PCard implementation team. The call helped to address issues surrounding the file transfer protocols as well as cardholder and reconciler/approver roles and data. The PCard team provided the UF file layout documentation to the MBNA to address the needs for the incoming bank statement file that will be transmitted from MBNA to UF. We are expecting a sample file for MBNA shortly so we can load the sample transactions for testing purposes. Documentation for the PCard modifications have now all been completed and approved following the projects standard modification request and approval process. There will be five minor modification completed on the PCard functionality for the July 1 Go-Live. No additional changes will be made until phase two. Year-end process discussions have been started to map out the most efficient way to sunset the previous system (Pathway Net Flair connection) and bring up the fully functional PeopleSoft PCard module. General Ledger The General Ledger team continues to focus on working with the technical staff to define and test modifications to the system with the majority of our effort going to the Payroll Distribution component and related infrastructure required to meet the functional specifications. The development of the component is complete and the interface between it and the PeopleSoft delivered budget definition component is underway. A meeting is scheduled for this week for the users to review the component and sign-off on the functional requirements. The team participated in a performance / volume test on payroll accounting transactions in order to determine if the PeopleSoft messaging architecture will support UF s payroll volume. It was determined that the messaging supports accounting batches of 100,000 transactions or less. The anticipated volume per payroll is 750,000 to 1,000,000. Additional testing is underway. Finally, TestDirector requirement definition and unit testing of development modifications is on-going priority. The team is driving towards the completion of development and test initialization of system test on February 1st. Vendor Relations Vendor Relations Purchasing met with the Infrastructure team to discuss in more detail the use of the fax server and software. Based on the volume of information Page 2 of 5

3 either as inbound or outbound, we decided the method of transmission should be Voice Over IP (VoIP). They had set-up a conference call with InterStar to discuss their product and pricing. InterStar will send a demo CD for the Infrastructure to test with. We are continuing to work with the Technical team on the workflow processing. Discovered a problem within PeopleSoft eprocurement upon a requisition being rejected by the next approval level, the requisition doesn't go back to the requestor, it just loops within the system. Troy logged a case within PeopleSoft. We met with Business Services and Information Systems (IS) concerning the ID encumbrances for postage. Currently, their billing to departments is handled by a program within IS. As the current Pitney Bowes system is limited to only 10 characters for an encumbrance number and PeopleSoft's encumbrance number is 15 characters we are working on a solution that maybe IS's program can run a translation of information back and forth. After the initial meeting, all parties are going back for more information and we will meet again in a week for more discussion. We will contact Grainger and Britanna to follow up on issues we are having with the Direct Connect connections. Vendor Relations Payables participated in testing with FITST Payroll to run the voucher build, voucher post, pay cycle and payment posting. The voucher build and post was successful. We will complete the pay cycle and payment posting next week. In order to provide AP voucher requirements to the technical group for interfaces, we continued with the mapping process to specify the fields required to build vouchers. Working with the PCard team, we ran a voucher build. Completed the questionnaires requested by Steve S. for our various interfaces including ID transfers, ALEPH, Student Refunds and Student vendors. These are posted on the E drive. Travel and Expense The T&E team continues to update test scripts in TestDirector, develop modifications for expense transaction functionality, and convert and translate data from legacy systems to PeopleSoft. We met with the developer in charge of writing the PeopleCode to calculate per diem amounts for meals based on time of departure and time of return. During expense type data entry (for MEALS), the code will evaluate the departure time on the start date (i.e. first day of trip) and the return time on the end date (i.e. last day of trip) to determine the per diem amount for that day. Any days in between those dates will default the daily meal per diem to $21 per Florida Statutes. Users may override these calculations to any amount less than the per diem allowance to account for conference lunches and the like. Page 3 of 5

4 Customer Relations The Customer Relations discussed the next steps with the developer writing the inbound bank reconciliation interface. Basically we need to meet with Wachovia to determine their experience with PeopleSoft customers especially as it relates to electronic statements. We came up with a list of questions for the bank and will try to meet with them in the next week or two. The developer is also working on all outbound bank interfaces so that meeting will involve all interfaces between UF and Wachovia. The AR_UPDATE process produced an error indicating a duplicate entry even though there was no evidence of a duplicate entry in any of the applicable tables. We updated the configuration for the Payment Entry Type (i.e. PY) so that PeopleSoft would accept multiple payments for a given item. This change caused AR_UPDATE to run successfully and update customer balances accordingly. Customer Relations continues to receive data extracts from our external systems relating to Customer and Charge Code data. The customer information also includes contact information, which we will use to set up ebill Payment and maintain conversations and the like. As we receive the data, we are combining them in a master database to eliminate duplicates and correct errors (i.e. data scrubbing). We remain focused on extracting data from our many shadow systems, prototyping business processes, and updating TestDirector with test scripts. Event Management The Event Management team met with UF Performing Arts to review the set up of Projects. We are working on completing an end to end pilot for them to assess and critique. Facilities and Property Management The Asset Management team will resume testing Asset Conversion load after Developer resource becomes available. We will continue to work incoming load file missing data issues with Property Management and Construction Accounting. Projects configuration is complete in FIMST. Will create test projects, budgets and hold walk through sessions with all users over the next three weeks to shake out areas where user expectations are not being met. Sponsored Programs The Sponsored Programs team has been working with the Division of Sponsored Research to standardize the current sponsor information to facilitate conversion to PeopleSoft. It is necessary to include sponsor addresses for all sponsors and the team has been requesting the help of the community to collect this information. Basic legacy information cleanup is ongoing and the team works daily with the central offices to achieve this objective. The team has been identifying the institutional reporting requirements based on currently available Page 4 of 5

5 reports from legacy systems. Conversion is moving forward and it is expected to have an initial population of sponsors and active awards by January 15. Also, it was decided this week that a pilot instance would be established to assist in system testing and training. Testing Strategy Work continues on the development of a testing strategy for the financials team. In this effort we are determining the utilization of testing tools, the configuration of those tools, and the level of work required to ensure the scope of testing is sufficient to properly validate the system configuration. All teams continue to update the university s testing requirements in our primary testing tool, TestDirector. Each requirement maps to a test lab that contains detailed test scripts. Anytime we complete a modification, refresh an instance, or update any configuration in our master instance; we will step through each test script and record the results against expectations. Once the modifications and configurations pass their tests completely, we will copy them to the remaining database instances. About the Colors This status report is using three color-coded symbols to indicate the status of each part of the work. Green ( ) indicates the work is on schedule and future deliverable dates are expected to be met. Yellow ( ) indicates some deliverable dates may be missed but major milestone dates are not in jeopardy. Red ( ) indicates dates have already been missed and/or that future dates are in jeopardy. Page 5 of 5