First two modules of human resources phase of
UI-Integrate to be implemented in December

By Sharita Forrest, Assistant Editor
(217) 244 -1072; slforres@illinois.edu

Change is under way for the three UI campuses’s outdated and disparate student, financial and human resource business systems.

The first two modules of the university’s new Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, developed through the UI-Integrate project, will be rolled out in December, project team members say. The new system, a suite of integrated software programs and business processes, is being implemented universitywide to update and consolidate the current systems.

The $197 million UI-Integrate project is led by teams composed of core and functional members from the Chicago, Springfield and Urbana campuses.

The project began in July 2000 as a preventive mechanism to streamline the university’s business processes and to update obsolete hardware and software systems. Although the three campuses collectively were using more than 100 applications in their student systems, only five were used by more than one campus. Likewise, some systems, such as the 30-year-old payroll system, relied on outdated technology and posed a substantial financial risk if they failed.

"The major goal is to really come up with better business processes that are more streamlined, that result in more timely data, more accurate data, that follow best practices in higher education," said Margaret Krol, project director. "We have lots of separate computer systems and a number of them are quite old. That makes it difficult when somebody wants to change the way the university does something – sometimes we’re constrained by those old systems."

The new software package is Banner2000, which was designed specifically for higher education by SCT Corp., an information technology company headquartered in Malvern, Pa., serving more than 1,800 clients worldwide.

The new system will provide a more reliable wide-area network linking the three UI campuses and providing greater bandwidth for the Springfield campus. Once it’s fully implemented, the new system also will incorporate self-service Web-browser-based functions for students.

After nearly a year in the design phase, the first two modules of the Banner2000 system, the employee relations and bio/demo modules in the human resource component, will go "live" in December. The employee relations module contains contract information for university employees represented by bargaining units, and the bio/demo module encompasses biographic and demographic information for all employees.

When the employee relations module takes effect in December, NESSIE (Net-driven Employee Self-Service and Information Environment) – the current Web environment designed to assist university employees in conducting human resources transactions – will become a central repository for bargaining-unit information. Currently, some of this information, such as contract renewal and expiration dates and covered employee classes, is stored in NESSIE, while related data, such as union contacts and addresses, is maintained separately by central human resources and labor relations staff.

As each of the 24 modules of the Banner2000 software system are put into place during the next three years, existing systems will be overhauled or retired. For the December implementations, the NESSIE and Electronic Change of Status (ECOS) systems, both of which access or update biographic and demographic information, are being redesigned so they will feed information into databases within the Banner2000 system.

Over time, existing systems such as InPower, the current system for storing and maintaining biographic and demographic information, will be phased out as will UI Direct, the current online system for course registration and grade retrieval.

A related universitywide initiative, the Decision Support project, also is under way, and team members are developing a reporting infrastructure so system users can access in-common data for reporting purposes. The decision support team is now converting data from InPower to Banner2000 to ensure it will be available to produce required reports when the two modules are implemented in December.

Because the biographical/demographic and employee relations modules are subordinate applications, few employees beyond a hundred or so central human resources personnel will notice any changes when those modules are implemented, say project team members.

However, these two modules are laying some of the groundwork for additional modules that will go "live" later. Two additional modules are scheduled to go "live" during 2002 and will affect a larger portion of the university community: the benefit administration and student recruiting and admissions modules.

To facilitate communications between the university community and the project team, a unit liaison program was recently implemented. Unit liaisons will help assess their units’ preparedness as modules are readied for implementation, will help validate personnel training needs within units and will help implement the new processes.

"Where a lot of projects like this fail is they don’t do a good job of communicating and assessing unit readiness in kind of the middle tier," said Rich Mendola, UI project executive and associate vice president of administrative information technology services.

"We’ve got to have people out there telling us what needs to get done for that area, and we’ve got to be sharing with them all of the information that’s relevant to the implementation," Mendola said.

Approximately 10,500 core users of the system will undergo some form of training as new modules are implemented, Mendola said.

In functional areas with significant procedural changes, classroom training will be scheduled at various sites. Online tutorials, videos and other self-study options will be available for other users.

To ensure that the system will meet users’ needs, the project team is collaborating with UI employees through focus groups, issues resolution sessions and conference room pilots, which are demonstrations of proposed business processes using the new system. To date, more than 400 UI employees have participated in more than 42 conference room pilot projects.

Although the project will standardize some of their systems, the three campuses will continue to have flexibility in their operating procedures where needed to meet specific campus requirements, Krol said.

The Banner software system implementation affects only the human resource, finance and student administrations systems. It does not affect applications such as building access and parking or desktop software and e-mail.

NESSIE will look much the same and will continue functioning as employees’ portal into their human resource and benefit files for the time being. The Panda and I-card systems, which also are tied to the new human resource and bio/demo modules, will operate as they always have.

For more information on the UI-Integrate project, visit the UI-Integrate Web site at www.ui-integrate.uillinois.edu/.