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Onward and Upward

by April Vidor, Admission Team Lead

As the song goes, “Will it go round in circles?  Will it fly high like a bird up in the sky?”

When first we heard that Drew was considering replacing AIMS with Banner, many of us experienced a thrill that combined a frisson of fear with a sigh of relief.  For many, it was a long time (a decade?) in coming.  For others, concerns arose about having to learn something new.  Not only new technology but also a new “language” and, most of all, a new way of looking at things. 

In September, the Admissions Team experienced our BPA – the Business Process Analysis.  This was an intensive three day brain storming session coupled with a review of current practices.  It brought together for the first time members of all the different admissions staffs from every school within the University --the Caspersen School for Graduate Studies, the Theological School, Continuing Education and the College of Liberal Arts.  Under the stimulating and professional guidance of our SIG consultants we did something many had never done before:  we took a cold hard look at how we do things.  Our procedures.  Our policies.  Our use of manpower not to mention other resources.  And we discovered some interesting things.  That we have experience and information to share with one another.  That “we have more in common than not”, as so aptly noted by Linda Bond-Nelson, Operations Manager in CLAADM.  That there were many opportunities to reduce redundancies, outmoded recordkeeping, and data processing methods.  Good-bye date stamping!  In short we learned that there were easier, more efficient ways to conduct business and support the University’s mission.   That we can streamline our operations – both input/data processing and output/reporting and communications.  And that ultimately it will make all our lives easier and more effective. 

This week, individual offices of admission hosted our SIG consultant during a “house call”.   Each department had the opportunity to physically demonstrate some of our current practices and discuss how we hope to improve upon them.  We continued discussions begun during the BPA and began to identify more opportunities where interdepartmental cooperation will benefit all concerned.

One result of these training sessions, and pre-planning experiences has been to generate an appetite to get started.  From Derek Elkins, Assistant Director of Admissions, in the Theological School:  “I'm looking forward to beginning the part of this process when we're making decisions”.  From Chris Tyburski, Director of College Admission, “The BPA was a great experience.  I think the process helped all of the various admission functions get a sense of each other's successes and challenges.  It also helped us begin to establish common ground on which we can build Banner.

Although BPA stands for “Business Process Analysis” it might just as well be called “Bringing Progress Across-the-board”.  Along the way we are learning new skills (love those Gliffys), new technology, new best practices, new acronyms (can we ever get too much TLC?) and new ways we can support one another’s goals.  So far it looks like we may finally reduce a number of instances where we’ve been going round in circles. I hope other members of the Drew community enjoy these same exciting opportunities and the chance to spread their wings. 

Thoughts From the Finance Team

by Frank Maltino, Finance Team Lead

Over the past month of Banner training, the Finance Team has made some observations that we would like to share. 

Banner is quite different than our existing system and has multiple levels of detail which we feel will be beneficial when we begin to learn how to use its reports - while at the same time the system is very complex.  

Steve Barcus, the Finance Module trainer from SIG, is a good trainer.  He clearly explained the subject matter and used repetition and student participation to ensure that the students understood the material. In addition, he demonstrated the material he has/is presenting by using actual Banner screens, which helped me better understand the processes. Since the system is new to us, we are very unfamiliar with the Banner screens, and at times there appear to be many options to be selected on each screen to extract or enter data. Given the extensive level of detail, we do expect the system to be able to provide useful reports.  One module that we have just completed our initial training on is the Endowment Module.  In short, a high level of detail which may be good, but out of the box reporting and unitization are not meeting expectations.  We look forward to more hands on training, more reporting capabilities and more practical “how to do” applications.

The PA BUG conference

by Alan Candiotti, Assistant Vice-President of Technology

From November 21 to November 23, sixteen people from Drew attended the Pennsylvania Banner Users Group conference in Hershey, PA, along with some four hundred representatives of schools using Banner in Pennsylvania and New Jersey.  For us, it was a chance to see what other schools are doing with Banner and also to hear from SunGard about plans for development of Banner. The Drew people attending were from the College Dean’s office, Human Resources, College Admissions, Finance, the Registrar, Student Life, the Business Office and University Technology.

I attended a variety of conference sessions, about technology and many of the functions supported by Banner.  Among the more interesting were the sessions about degree planning and degree audit using Degree Works, presented by Messiah College, and mobile applications presented by Bucknell University, and some sessions about processing financial transactions.  Degree Works will allow students, working with their advisors, to plan their curriculum, with their plans, as well as the courses they have already completed, shown in their degree audit – checking on their progress and planned progress toward fulfilling their degree requirements.  It will also allow us to gauge demand for course sections in the future because students’ plans will be in the system, so we will have an idea of how many people wish to or need to take certain courses in any given semester.

Overall, the conference served a few purposes very well.  One was simply seeing the range of Banner applications as they are used by other schools.  Seeing it in this way brought the applications to life because they could be demonstrated in the context of their use in similar institutions.  A second was hearing from SunGard about issues related to their current products and about their imminent or pending new products.  One of the advantages of dealing with a large company like SunGard is that they have the ability to enhance current products and develop new ones as technology advances.  A third purpose was to establish contact with peers at other institutions who are using Banner.  Finally, yet another result of the conference was to add energy to our Drew 360 project.  Seeing the product in action at many peer institutions and seeing the energy leveraged at those institutions in order to provide excellent service using Banner added some extra energy and motivation to our own project.