UDFS – Report Team Minutes

 

August 7, 2002

 

In attendance:  Van Adams, Peggy Bottorff, Ellen Lepine, Marsha Lockard, Cheryl Morris, Carol Rylee, Amy Taylor

Absent:  Julie Burton, Kat Collison

 

 

TASKS ASSIGNED:

Ellen Lepine – Review & report on PS recording “Navigating Customer Connection”

                                    Scheduled for Report Team meeting on 08/21/02

 

 

GENERAL MEETING MINUTES:

 

I.                 Executive Committee Update:  Last meeting spent reviewing/commenting upon RFP for consulting help.  That RFP has been mailed to 8 firms; responses due 8/15; expect to interview 3 or 4 firms and have the selected firm start in early September.

II.               Cheryl talked to contact at Princeton about how they get balances out of PSFinancials.  As we’d been told, balances are not stored by PS; they are calculated on the fly.  Princeton extracts balance information and stores in data warehouse.  They also find Nvision problematic; use Oracle Reports as their basic tool.

III.             RUG highlights: Cheryl and Van attended and shared insights.  Some web issues:  can’t develop Crystal reports from web (but can run them); can’t copy from web and paste elsewhere (need to do alt-print screen, or run reports right to Excel or elsewhere).  Exporting PS Queries to Excel 95/97 problematic from versions 8.X;  works ok with Excel 2000.  PS is really selling the benefits of commitment control (a.k.a. budgetary control), and seems to be building functionality around it (not clear what if anything we lose if we don’t use it though).  Concerns include:  how accurate can it be without encumbrances; will it require a lot more data entry; setup appears cumbersome.

IV.            Public Query Subteam Update:  none

V.              Communications Team Update:  Team held 8 focus groups last week; summary has been mailed to report team; next step for Comm team is to rough out timeline and list of training methodologies; Comm team members are identifying the people in their “train the trainer” networks.

VI.            Decisions to Main List:  none.

 

 

WORK SESSION NOTES:

  1. Cheryl compared Public Queries in 7.5 to Public Queries in 8.4.  Number increased from 556 to 1,026; Van noted this is likely due to fact that 8.4 combines corporate and E&G.  Cheryl has put together a spreadsheet of the queries that are common to both, and those in just one of the versions, and has noted several groups of queries that were added or dropped.   Request will be sent to Executive Team leader asking that student intern be assigned to update the PS Query review work done last year in 7.5 for current delivered Public Queries in 8.4.
  2. Group discussed recommendations from Communication Team focus group summary.  Those recommendations are reproduced below:

 

Recommendations to Report Team

 

1.      Extremely important to MANY people to be able to link their own tables to PS tables, for ad-hoc and other reporting.  This may argue in favor of a data warehouse (can users easily link to PS tables any other way?)

2.      Extremely important to almost as many people to retain key functionality of UD Check:  ability to add data to “live” rows of data.  Data warehousing will also make this possible – tables in “new” data warehouse could be used w/ UD Check as current data warehouse tables are.  Modifications will be needed but it is feasible. 

3.      Continue to have views similar to what is in GA Query.

4.      People need ready access to balances.

5.      Address issue of encumbrances – P.O. encumbrances and salary/benefits.  HR no longer encumbers, but could this be built in, as a public query, esp. in light of the labor allocation module?  (That is, salary data is stored for everyone someplace other than in PS HR.  Can we access it to use for a public query?  With the addition of fiscal/academic contract field, it seems so.)

6.      Many will operate more efficiently/effectively if they can download “labeled” information; that is, if the GA Query-type information (with headings telling what is being displayed) could be downloaded to Excel.  This would eliminate a LOT of date re-entry.  This would be an enhancement over what we have now.

7.      Make sure the historical data in the warehouse is retained – many people do historical comparisons.

 

Report Team discussed the need to make data accessible for joining with users own tables, and for use with UD Check (not replacing UD Check, but continuing to be ACCESSIBLE for UD Check or similar interface).  It was agreed that we don’t know if data warehousing is the way to do that – may be a more cost-effective way – but users need this accessibility.  Also agreed that #6 recommendation sounded very feasible and would be good to provide.