In This Issue
Banner is coming! Banner is coming! To Your Purchase Requisitions!
Yes, Banner is here at the Purchasing Department and it will be up and live sooner than you think. Purchasing will be going live with Banner on May 17th. All FY2012 Purchase Requisitions will be submitted to Purchasing through the Banner Purchase Requisitioning module.
If you feel some trepidation: do not fear, training is here. I will be conducting training sessions for those individuals identified by their academic units and administrative departments as key users of the Banner Requisitioning/Receiving module. Training will also be available to those individuals identified as on-line approvers. We will be conducting training sessions for Requisitioning/Receiving and Approvals on April 18th, 19th and 20th and on May 2nd and 6th. Registration for training classes will be available on http://www.drew.edu/depts/its/training/register_workshop.php.
Some of the key advantages of on-line requisitioning are the available data (you don’t have to worry about misfiled Purchase Requisition and Purchase Order documents – you can find them on-line); on-line approvals (you don’t have to run that paper Requisition around campus to get signatures); and if you are re-ordering something you can copy an old Requisition (you don’t have to re-type the entire document).
Another major aspect of Banner is the Receiving module. Once items have been received by the end-user department, the key user who entered the Purchase Requisition into Banner will now indicate receipt of items through Banner’s Receiving module. Diane Zsombik, in Accounts Payable, will no longer be stamping an invoice and mailing it to the end-user department for approval. The key advantage to this process is that invoices will no longer need to be sent out for an approval signature (and potentially get lost). The acknowledgment of receipt through the Receiving module will now act as the signature on an invoice.
Steve Barcus, our Finance Module trainer, has worked hard to get us set up and trained on Banner. I look forward to sharing my knowledge about Banner Requisitioning/Receiving and Approvals with you.
Simplifying Business Practices: Reducing Levels
During the months of January and February, our student services teams worked with the consultants from Strata Information Group to plan the structure of the student services part of Banner. Fundamental to that structure is the concept of a level. The word level, as it applies to the Banner software, denotes a division of the academic program into parts – such as undergraduate, masters and doctoral. Each such level has its own academic rules, course schedules, transcripts, fee structures and other academic procedures. We quickly discovered that, in order to follow the business practices we had been following, we would need some twenty levels, comparable to a very large university, because so many of our academic programs had small variations in academic rules and were accustomed to issuing transcripts that applied only to those programs. As we observed that this practice caused heavily increased workloads in offices of the registrar, bursar and other student services offices, and we wished to use the occasion of the Drew 360 project to simplify our business practices, we decided to bring the interested parties together to try to reduce the number of levels in our student system.
On February 9, the deans of the three schools met with Provost Gunter-Smith, the registrar, two of our SIG consultants and myself and confronted the issue. We emerged from the meeting with an agreed upon simplified structure. When Banner is implemented, there will be seven rather than twenty levels. Those levels will be undergraduate, masters and doctoral in the Caspersen School, academic masters and doctoral in the Theological School, and professional masters and doctoral in the Theological School. We hope that this simplification of our business practices will be one of many that will allow Drew to take full advantage of the Drew 360 project.
Reporting and Data Standards
With the decision to upgrade our University-wide software, the Reporting and Data Standards Team was formed to help in establishing standards for data entry and assist with determining a reporting solution. To that end, two software products were selected to assist the University in meeting those goals.
The first, Argos by eVisions, was selected as the University’s reporting solution. We have a campus-wide license which allows access to reports for anyone who needs them. It can also be used with any system that exists on campus and not just Banner.
The second, CleanAddress, was purchased to set standards for entering and verifying addresses as they are entered into Banner. Accurate addresses will ensure that less mail is returned to the University. Using the USPS standards will also allow the University to take advantage of bulk mailing rates when possible.
For more information on the decisions being made by our team, please look to the Drew360 Reporting and Data Standards Team page in UKnow.