In This Issue
We had a busy summer with the Drew 360 project this year. Please take some time to see what happened while the weather was hot and the beaches were open...
CoCo - Student Affairs
by Frank Merckx
It is here. The Drew 360, AKA the Banner project, has hit student affairs. The Housing, Student Conduct and Parking system will be utilizing Adirondack Solutions, a SunGard/Banner partner. The first section of Adirondack to go live at Drew is the Student Conduct Coordinator, lovingly called CoCo, which has debuted this Fall semester.
CoCo is comprehensive from Incident Report writing, to collecting incident history, logging standard letters and enhanced reporting. Yet the area that will save the student conduct staff the most time is the automatic letter writing/emailing system and tracking. With the click of a button, an email is sent, letter saved and student record noted. What before took 30 minutes to 2 hours per notification and filing is now 5 minutes for every notification. When fully implemented, students will be receiving automatic notices reminding when their community service is due, when their alcohol education class will occur and other reminders, including that sweet email notifying them that they are no longer on a probationary status.
The one major downside to CoCo is that we will be putting to rest a great database tool developed by Drew’s own John Saul, which served us well for seven years. But now when you are watching a late night comic/variety show and hear the name CoCo, don’t think of a red-headed former NBC employee but of karma in student conduct land.
Banner Relationship Management - Admission
by Andrew Minegar
BRM (Banner Relationship Management) was set up over the summer as a replacement for the communication modules in AIMS and the alternative to Banner when looking up information on individual students. To summarize a huge amount of work into a few sentences, the Admission Team [including representatives from the College, Theological School, Graduate School, and Continuing Education] prepared for this implementation by mapping each admission office's communication plan (mailings and e-mailings) and building BRM campaigns to handle each leg of that plan. The campaigns are very visual, and allow for individualized communication with prospective students in a way that AIMS could not. In early August, we "went live" by launching both Banner and BRM.
Treehouse
by Justin Jackson
treehouse.drew.edu launched its pilot on August 15th, in the form of the new employee tab on what you're used to as drew.edu/home. It combines content from CampusWeb and the former employees tab with new functionality brought to us by the Drew 360 project. Student & Faculty specific tabs are in development, so if you'd like to be involved in the focus group, please let us know. This is just a first step; much more personalized content is on the way as the project progresses, so stay tuned!
Banner Changes for HR
by Deborah Raikes-Colbert, taken from HR News 9 August 2011 and 2 September 2011
Since last fall, HR has been involved in training and preparation for the implementation of Banner, the new administrative system that is replacing Aims. Banner will maintain employment, salary and benefit information for all current faculty, staff and students, and will be used to issue all paychecks. The new system is scheduled to “go live” on January 1, 2012.
As part of the implementation process, we are in the process of auditing EVERY aspect of pay and benefits for all full and part-time faculty and staff. As a result, we are discovering discrepancies in vacation accruals and/or benefits enrollment for some individuals. We will contact affected individuals to advise of the error(s) and the correction as soon as possible.
As with all new systems, there will be changes to how we manage information and data. Banner has a number of new features that we will utilize—as well as some limitations—and starting today we will share with you the changes that may affect your paycheck, benefits, and/or related information. We want to alert you to these changes now so that you can begin to plan for any changes that may impact how you manage your personal finances.
Effective with the first paychecks issued in January, 2012, a number of changes are being made. [Please refer to your August issue of HR News for these details.]
Monthly Time Reporting. Monthly paid staff will be required to report time used in one month no later than the end of the following month (e.g., time taken in September must be reported before October 31). You will no longer be able to report time used later in the year. Now would be a good time to review your monthly time reports to ensure that you are up to date. Once we move to Banner [on January 1, 2012], you will not be able to go back to correct and/or update time taken before December 31, 2011.
General Person
by John Saul
Over the summer, several new parts of the Drew 360 project went live. The most core element that went live in August was the General Person portion of Banner. As of August 8th, all records about who people are at Drew are now housed and maintained within the Banner system. This means that all name, address and phone information is being maintained via the Banner system and being automatically pushed back into our legacy AIMS system so that other areas, such as the Business Office, have correct information until they are also live in Banner.
While this is a fundamental and important step in going live with the rest of the products in the Drew 360 project, what this really means for the general public at Drew is very little at this time. You shouldn’t notice any major changes to how you access systems, or where you go to get your services. The only real difference is that address changes, while still able to be submitted online, are going to happen on a slightly more delayed schedule [until everything is on Banner]. Any Students or Faculty/Staff who need a more immediate address change should contact the Registrar’s office or Human Resources respectively.