UDFS-Report Team Minutes

April 17, 2002

In attendance:

Marsha Lockard, Van Adams, Amy Taylor, Carol Rylee, Cheryl Morris

DECISION MADE: None.

TASKS ASSIGNED:

Read & comment on Trees Subteam tip documents (excludes "Trees Needed") posted to: http://www.udel.edu/UDFS/trees.html

ISSUES: To the Executive Team: None.

 

GENERAL MEETING MINUTES:

 

  1. Executive Committee Update
    1. Carol did not have any specific issues to report from the Executive Committee. There was general discussion among the Reports Team about the implementation and processing problems that have occurred with PS HR, and how a conceptual understanding of those issues would help in planning the implementation of PS Financials particularly in regards to the need for parallel and backwash systems that may fail.
  2. Public Query Sub team Report – Amy reported that the sub-team met with Burt and Betty from the AP function team to review the existing AP reports. Although there are over 100 reports available to A/P now, they don’t actually use all of them. Burt and Betty will go through the entire listing and prioritize them into four categories:
    1. Use now, must have in PeopleSoft
    2. Use now, may need to have in PeopleSoft
    3. Use now, may not need in PeopleSoft (business process may eliminate need for the current report)
    4. Don’t use now, won’t use in PeopleSoft

    The sub-team will meet again in a couple of weeks to review the feedback from the AP functional team and hopes to have a sample process ready in early June.

     

     

     

  3. Trees Sub team Report – Marsha distributed a new page on the UDFS website where they have begun to compile tips and discoveries. Assignment: please review the documents and provide feedback on readability and clarity of the instructions. Can a less experienced person read the documents and follow them? The sub team will next look at node-oriented trees.
  4. Delivered Reports & JVs Sub Team Report – Marsha reported they have been working with trees and had some success setting up the roll-up tree. They did run into the time spans issue that causes some problems with the Nvision reports. Sometimes time spans are required and sometimes they are not. The team is still working through the details. PS Query seems to allow more flexibility than Nvision. Nvision seems to be more useful for recurring reports. They require more set up time, but then you have a shell to use over and over. Julie has offered to do some in-service training, perhaps as an introduction to Nvision class.
  5. PS Red Paper: "Addressing Your Power User Needs" - Carol reviewed this paper. PeopleSoft defines a power user in this case as someone who handles lots of data entry, for example in situation when data entry would be centralized. There were five areas addressed in the paper:
    1. Hardware and software configurations
    2. Workspace organization
    3. Decreasing key strokes
    4. Decreasing wait time (response to the server)
    5. Optimizing query and excel integration.

    Carol suggested keeping the document for the details and adding it to the notebooks available in 003 Hullihen.

  6. COGNOS vs PeopleSoft Enterprise – Van lead a lively discussion around the question of reporting tools, what might be delivered with our version of the product (as we have purchased Budget which could be bundled with Cube Manager). We still have not fully confirmed what tools will be delivered. There are real advantages to stay with a PeopleSoft product rather then mix with a COGNOS product. If the Enterprise Warehouse is bundled with PS, does this create a reporting instance? Suggestion to the Communications Group – would be helpful to find out who uses which tables currently in the Data Warehouse?