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.
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.