October 23, 2002
In attendance:
UD: Van Adams, Peggy Bottorff, Ellen Lepine, Marsha Lockard, Raja Rao, Carol Rylee, Amy Taylor, Wendy Houang, Julie Burton
Crestone: Rick McCaulley, Michael Downey
Absent: Kat Collison, Cheryl Morris
TASKS ASSIGNED:
To consultants within 2-3 weeks:
Peggy: List of people throughout campus who are actually writing/relying upon reports (focus on ad hoc): what they need, their level of competency, what kind of manipulation they do (to determine: “who needs what” capability)
Marsha: List of “who receives what” paper, DAZEL reports, or microfiche
(will also share copies of report listings collected by functional teams –
corresponding report samples can be found in 003 HH)
Julie: Obtain list of “who has what” access to warehouse, GA-PRD or SuperNatural
Ongoing:
All: list data elements that we need, so that consultants can show us where they reside (or can reside) in PeopleSoft (e.g. complimentary data that we currently join with warehouse data) *** NOTE – SEE G/L TEAM DOCUMENT FOUND AT FOLLOWING URL: http://www.udel.edu/UDFS/gl.html “UD-PS Comparison”
GENERAL MEETING NOTES:
Marsha gave overview of team work: team formed ~2 years ago; evaluating reporting tools (PS tools and other); reviewed UD delivered and adhoc report listings with samples collected by functional teams; compared UD reports to PS delivered reports with some functional team review; three report subteams concentrated efforts on PS public queries, trees, and delivered g/l reports such as trial balance and financial statements.
Peggy: Ad hoc reporting key; people in units need to be able to access the same type of data they can access now, and join it with other sources of data; high-end users can do their own manipulation if they have access; less sophisticated users will continue to need “labeled” data.
Julie: They need continued ability to “get the data out” of PeopleSoft. Need to tag data, e.g. with project numbers; need to report on varied timetables (project start and end dates; federal fiscal year); need encumbrances (currently do “on the fly” on their own – PO, salary, benefit, IDC encumbrances)
Amy: Need to be able to do analysis of information at a high level, and need to address needs of very unsophisticated users who are not especially software-savvy but who still have needs to monitor accounts. Want tools that are easy to use and easy to teach. Likes what she’s seen in Crystal. Also discussed Public Query subteam – note that many reports may use same query as the background data-grabber.
Carol: Does extensive management financial reporting for Executive Vice President/Treasurer and for Board of Trustees. Biggest need is access to the raw data; comfortable manipulating/presenting it with current tools. LOTS of ad hoc reporting – answering questions that arise, and may or may not arise again. Needs to do many joins, including marrying data from multiple sources (e.g. pulling financial aid data using Supernatural and HR data from PS-HR).
Marsha: Use delivered and ad-hoc reports. It is critical to have auditable reports – critical not just to some individual users, but also to the institution. Concern about how we will monitor the Chart of Accounts and tree changes (assuming multiple personnel will be responsible for maintenance as done in current system).
Van: Concerns include
Consultant Comments (Rick McCaulley)
Reporting is the main purpose of all PeopleSoft modules, with possible exception of Purchasing. This is why consultants will spend approximately 60% of their time on reporting issues.
Reporting is never “finished” – new needs always arise. It is best to focus on getting the data, and not spend lots of time on formatting reports. Formatting is time-intensive and is likely not the best use of consultants’ time.
Assigned “homework” (described above).
Security: recommends that we implement as little security as we can get away with (more security à more time to maintain) – but recognizes that row-level security may be necessary.
Maintainance of trees and COA an important issue. He strongly urges us to not have one person responsible for all of this as it is a full-time job. We could have units creating and maintaining their own trees, and can maintain necessary control by having specific approvals required when new chartfields are added, and by limiting the “level” of changes that non-central users can make.