Introducing the Testing Tracker

 

For the FST project, September means one thing in particular, and it’s not pumpkin spice latte season.

It's TESTING!  

As of September 1, the FST team has begun the testing phase of the project, which will stretch until January 14 of next year. This testing is called end-to-end testing, where the team tries to break the system to find any issues to fix.  Following the end-to-end testing period, user experience testing will begin in February.  Read more about testing on the blog here.

We want to keep you up to date on what's going on with end-to-end testing (or, E2E, as you'll likely see it referred to), we’ll have a regular “testing tracker” post in the blog to keep everyone up to date on testing. 

Look for more on testing very soon!

Reporting & Analytics Focus Group Update

During this month's governance meetings, Mark Anderson shared some information on the recently formed Reporting & Analytics Focus Group. The group has met twice now to review and provide feedback on reports. 

The primary goals of the Focus Group are to collect the perspective of those who use reports on a daily basis, to review reports to make sure they meet requirements (and to find solutions if they do not meet requirements), and to understand the differences between UBI and WD functionality. 

If you'd like to be involved in the Focus Group, please send an email to financetransformation@virginia.edu. However, please note that this group is intentionally small at this time as it is just a preliminary group to make sure the R&A Team is headed in the right direction. The Focus Group is not meant to be a fully-fledged testing of reports and only has a few members to be more effective, manageable, and participatory. Eventually, more people will be involved in the end-user review. 

Salesforce Success Stories: Student Financial Services

 Three months into their journey with Salesforce, Student Financial Services staff are pleased with the way the tool empowers them to better serve students.  

Jenn Bari, who manages the SFS Contact Center, says SFS leaders had been using a homegrown system to track student email cases for many years.  The system worked, but the team needed something that could better connect communication between students and families, and also that could give the team better reporting so they could make data-driven decisions regarding staffing and services, instead of gut instincts. 

"We wanted a system that had all the information in one place," says Bari. 

"We were having to look in five different places for previous conversations and it was hard to get context on what had already been discussed with students.  From a continuous improvement mindset, we knew we needed something that served us better."

Frustrated with their homegrown system's limitations, Bari had asked for alternative recommendations from UVA's Cornerstone Program during one cohort year.  After researching the problem, the Cornerstone team recommended Salesforce as the best solution for SFS.  At that time, the department wasn't able to make the change.  

Fast forward to a few years later, UVAFinance made the decision to adopt Salesforce and suddenly the option was on the table. 

"When Steve Kimata surprised me one week with a meeting about Salesforce, I asked 'does this mean my dream is coming true?'" laughs Bari.  

Scott Adams, Jack Jensen, Meredith Dixon, and Andrew Sallans of UVAFinance's Finance Engagement team got to work with the SFS team, piggybacking on what they'd already done implementing Salesforce with several other departments within Finance.  It took the group two months of intense work and collaboration to hammer out the details and get the new system set up.   

Now, after three months of using Salesforce, Bari and her colleagues can confirm Salesforce is, in fact, the fulfillment of their continuous improvement wish.

"Having our ticketing system and all the associated emails in one place is pretty significant," says Financial Aid Application Analyst John Martin.  

"Salesforce keeps everything visible to us."

Bari agrees, adding that the whole team can more easily communicate with one another and with students and families because of that visibility.  She notes that Salesforce has been especially useful for frontline staff, who, when students contact them, can see everything that has transpired before with the student's case, easily giving them updates and demonstrating coordinated services. 

So are SFS's stakeholders noticing the same positive impact the SFS staff is?  Martin says based on anecdotal evidence so far, the answer is yes, and Bari says that the three months of data they've collected so far will soon illustrate the answer to that question more clearly.  She's excited to report out on the data and tease out the trends. 

One thing they can say for sure so far is that Salesforce has enabled them to quantify their workload in a way they hadn't been able to before.  Bari notes that in their first three months with Salesforce, SFS logged over 10 thousand cases. 

"And that's ten thousand cases that were not manually tracked on a spreadsheet," Martin qualifies. 

Bari says the next steps for SFS beyond their data reporting will be to integrate their phone system into Salesforce for an even more complete, transparent picture of their customer service. 

PaymentWorks Goes Live at the End of the Month

PaymentWorks was one of the main topics at this month's Fiscal Administrators meeting. The supplier onboarding and management system goes live with Oracle on September 27th, so the PaymentWorks team wanted to inform stakeholders of all upcoming changes due to the transition. 

September 10th is the last day for vendor registrations to be completed in Jaeggar. After this, there will be a one-week blackout during which new suppliers cannot register. If there is an urgent matter during this time, contact Supplier Management at vendors@virginia.edu. This blackout only affects registration of new suppliers; payments will still be processed to registered vendors. 

September 20th will be the soft launch of PaymentWorks. Login information and training materials will be distributed to prepare for the 27th. 

In the weeks following go-live, active suppliers (who will remain active throughout the entire process) will receive an invitation to register in PaymentWorks. Individuals will need to re-register in PaymentWorks to be paid. Departments should notify and invite individuals to re-register to allow them to take advantage of new ACH payments and to get paid faster. Also, it is important to note that suppliers and individuals will be responsible for their own registration in PaymentWorks. 

For more information, check out the PaymentWorks Frequently Asked Questions page. If you'd like to view a demo of the system, you can do so here. 

FST Change Readiness Assessment #3 - Coming Soon!

The latest iteration of the finance transformation Change Readiness Assessment (CRA3) will be sent out on Tuesday, September 14. Keep an eye on your inbox, and please respond if you are invited to participate. 

The assessment gauges how ready stakeholders feel based on where we are in the Finance Strategic Transformation (FST) project. There are no right or wrong answers; this tool helps the project team know how stakeholders are feeling to inform our communications, engagement, and training strategies. It also provides FST Change Leaders (a.k.a. Advisory Group members) a clear sense of the needs and wants in their areas. 

Each iteration of the CRA allows us to capture a moment in time. Now, less than ten months away from Workday Financials go-live on July 1, 2022, people's sense of their level of preparedness undoubtedly is different then when assessed earlier. We just want a sense of where people are so we can better help them get where they need to be by the go-live date. 

The CRA3 survey closes on September 21, so please respond in a timely fashion if you receive it. Thank you for your ongoing efforts with finance transformation! 

New Terms Added to FST Glossary

New terms were recently added to the FST Glossary. These terms are primarily budget-related; for example, "revised budget," "sponsored award budget," and "working budget."

As a reminder, the FST Glossary is different from Workday Words in that it focuses on terms outside of Workday. The goal of the glossary is to strengthen UVA's shared understanding of terms central to UVAFinance, which will allow for more strategically informed decision-making. 

For definitions of the terms listed above, and to see the other recently added words, make sure to visit the Resources page on the FST website. 

Faculty Focus on Research: Salary Certification to Ease Administrative Burden

The FST Leadership Council recently signed off on a decision to transition UVA from effort reporting to salary certification as part of finance transformation’s continuous improvement efforts.

After the review of several options, including Workday’s Effort Certification, the recommendation is to implement Huron Employee Compensation Compliance (ECC) to replace our current Effort@ system. Since UVA will already implement Huron’s pre-award system (to replace ResearchUVA), we were able to negotiate a competitive price to include ECC as well. Final security-related sign-off is pending UVA ITS review of Huron security information gathered through a survey. The initial conversation between ITS security experts and Huron representatives went well, with ITS satisfied with the information Huron provided.

If all goes to plan, Huron ECC will be implemented after Workday Financials goes live on July 1, 2022. The first salary certification cycle using ECC would take place in the February-March 2023 timeframe. Huron ECC has been implemented at other universities, some of whom transitioned to Workday Financials, so integration between ECC and Workday should be seamless. The transition from effort to salary certification will align UVA with other R1 institutions that are looking at various ways to reduce administrative burden for both faculty and the institution, without compromising on compliance.

In late 2014, the federal government provided updated guidance on standards of documentation for salaries charged to federal awards and removed examples referencing effort certification. In 2015, UVA’s Organizational Excellence Office, Office of Sponsored Programs, and Financial Office of Compliance conducted focus groups with 110 faculty members in five schools. The major themes were consistent across the schools, and there was an overwhelming plea to improve Recon@UVA and Effort@UVA to reduce the associated burdens. In 2016, a consulting firm also evaluated ways to increase efficiency in federal compliance areas with a main focus on effort reporting. When the Finance Strategic Transformation project began, it seemed the opportune moment to act on these insights to better preserve the research time for UVA's esteemed faculty.

Office of Sponsored Programs Director of Post Award Urmila Bajaj, also the FST grants management co-lead, has long been an advocate of shifting to salary certification. Bajaj says, “We have heard from our faculty; they’re spending a lot more time on administrative tasks instead of research work. Federal funding is public money; we understand that we need to adhere to the federal compliance requirements. We can achieve that by creating an ethical and compliant environment, utilizing efficient systems supported by clear policies and guiding principles without overburdening the faculty and staff.  This transition to salary certification is one area where faculty and staff are going to appreciate UVA’s stand to reduce the admin burden drastically.”

While the change has not been formally announced yet, the FST team has communicated with departments, which have shared updates with their research faculty. Bajaj explains that faculty are enthusiastic about what they have heard so far.

Keep an eye on the blog for more information about this decision, and you can always stay up to date on project-related decisions with the FST Decision Log. 

Improving Fund Ownership Visibility: RAPID in progress

As a part of the RAPID decision-making process, the FST project team and Governance groups are considering the following question: 

Should UVA move away from the use of budgetary spending authority and instead base spending authority at the major business unit level on fund balance?

There are many benefits to making this move:

• Expendable fund balance reporting enabled – Units would have the ability to accurately report on funds available without needing to wait for yearend settlement and carryforward calculations. In combination with the FDM, anyone could run a trial balance on any combination of FDM worktags at any time. 
• 
  Clear ownership of funds – Consistent transfer of funds would make it clear “who owns the fund balance” and the "owner" of the fund will be able to see where the funds have been transferred and how much has been spent. 
•  Elimination of significant amounts of tracking outside of systems of record – Units could eliminate and/or streamline current tracking mechanisms (i.e. manual Excel spreadsheets).  
• Reduction in risks of errors – Through the elimination of the manual calculation of balances and the addition of robust real-time variance analysis capabilities. • 
• Increased staff capacity – This would allow more staff time to be devoted to analytical work rather than manual, tracking work.

In short, making this change would allow us to utilize Workday Financials to its fullest extent, reducing outside-of-the-system reporting and granting clear visibility into your funds.

Certainly, this change would require significant training:  the meaning of "budget" would be changed for many users, representing the unit's plans for the year instead of spending authority or funds available.  This would be a big adjustment for units that operate exclusively or nearly exclusively with spending authority.  It would reduce manual work done in shadow or supplemental systems but would require the movement of funds within the system. 

Contact Katie Walker at budget@virginia.edu with any thoughts/concerns you have about this decision, and watch for updates soon!

___________________________________________________________________

Read more about FST's decision-making structure

View the FST Decision Log

Procurement Aligns Buyer Staff to meet Customer Needs

When you think about central Procurement, you likely think of the place you go to get contracts signed.  That is definitely core to what the group does, but that isn't all they can do, and definitely not all they want to be able to do for their partners across UVA.

Procurement's Strategic Sourcing Director Alita Salley has been working with the buyer team to ensure that the structure and experience their team has aligns with UVA's goals and strategies.  With the realignment of some positions and additions of some staff, the team is moving into a model of Category Management.

As Salley explains it, there is a spectrum of activities that fall into the procurement realm, ranging from the thousands of day-to-day transactional purchases the team oversees, on to the more complex strategic sourcing that involves leveraging of purchasing power and strategy, and then the most complex activity, category management.

"Category management goes beyond the administrative functions of everyday purchasing and even the analysis and management involved with specific immediate and mid-term needs," explains Salley.  

She establishes category management as optimal management of a grouping of goods and services that have similar supply and usage characteristics.   The focus areas of Category Management illustrate its value: 

• Customer focus:  analyzing spend data and trends, building business cases and recommendations, developing strong partnerships with key influencers, creating comprehensive contract solutions, ensuring customers leverage contract resources, and maintaining an understanding of key value drivers.
• Product focus: understanding product offerings, defining categories and sub-category breakouts, discovering product alternatives, determining innovative or sustainable replacements.
• Supplier & Market focus: identifying primary suppliers and markets, overcoming barriers to entry, leveraging business growth opportunities, seeking opportunities to use SWaM businesses, establishing emergency response protocols for mission-essential vendors. 

As Procurement transitions out of a siloed structure into their new buyer team structure, stakeholders can expect to see more information on the departmental website and in regular UVAFinance communication channels (like the blog!).  Watch for more details soon!

New on Finance Matters: How to Navigate Change

Change Team Leader Angela Knobloch visits to discuss practical tips for managing yourself during times of change, including the dreaded "valley of despair."

Resources Mentioned:

• Gartner Report
• Engage for Change: Clarify Purpose, Honest Reflection, Assess Opportunities, Note progress, Grow Skills, Exhibit Flexibility

  

LISTEN HERE!

Optical Character Recognition for Invoices is live!

Procurement is happy to announce OCR (Optical Character Recognition) is now live. The
adoption of OCR means that we can process our supplier invoices faster, more accurately, and without manual entry.

Please be aware of a few changes that coincide with this implementation.

• This change only affects invoices submitted to vendor-invoices@virginia.edu or those mailed to PO Box 400197. If suppliers are submitting invoices through other departmental avenues, they should continue to follow their current procedure.
• PO Box Address Change: PO Box 400197 has been replaced by PO Box 3025, Scranton, PA on generated PO’s. Any invoices sent to this new address will be automatically uploaded, scanned into OCR, and electronically processed. Although it will speed up the processing time of mailed invoices, please be aware the suppliers may contact you to confirm the new address before processing. Please encourage all suppliers to email invoices to vendor-invoices@virginia.edu as we are transitioning away from accepting mailed invoices.
• Suppliers that are currently emailing their invoices do not need to change their process. OCR retrieves invoices sent through our email and processes them directly into Oracle.

Thank you for partnering with us as we implement this change, and don’t hesitate to email us at invoices@virginia.edu if you have any questions.

LSP Tip: Disconnect from a Wired or WiFi Connection

Submitted by your friendly neighborhood LSP Team

This is a follow-up tip to our Phishing review training.

An immediate step to take if you accidentally click on a link in a phishing email is to disconnect all access to the internet.

• Disconnect the ethernet cable if it is directly connected to your laptop.
• If there is an ethernet cable in a dock you are using, either:
• Disconnect the ethernet cable from the dock, or
• Unplug the USB-C cable from the dock to your laptop.
• Don't forget to disconnect your WiFi also. Many of your laptops are configured to automatically transition to a WiFi connection once disconnected from an ethernet cable.
• You can disconnect your WiFi by clicking on the WiFi symbol in your system tray. Then select Disconnect from your current network.
• You will see this symbol when you are disconnected from all internet access.
  

Connect your laptop after waiting a minute or so. Contact us at finhelp@virginia.edu, and also forward the suspicious email to abuse@virginia.edu. We will reach out and walk you through the steps of launching a virus/threat scan.

Open Enrollment is coming: Review Your Benefits Now

 UVA’s Benefits Open Enrollment for 2021 is October 4 – 15, 2021. 

NOW is your time to review and select benefits for next year. 

Learn what to expect this year, review your benefits use, mark your calendars for key dates, and register now for webinars and benefits presentations. Learn more.

 

Clara Tang on Internal Control and Her New Position as Senior Compliance Analyst

Clara and her children

“I missed finance!” Clara Tang said when asked what drew her to her current position in UVAFinance. She was previously working as a Senior Internal Auditor for the Health System, which she enjoyed, but she had very few opportunities to use her financial background. Clara, a CPA with almost nine years of experience in finance, says that her role as Senior Compliance Analyst perfectly combines finance with what she liked about being an auditor.

In this role, Clara will primarily work with a team to improve the University’s internal control of fiscal processes. “I will be looking at policy & procedure, business process, transactions, systems, and data analysis to assess our internal control under the COSO framework and to seek opportunities for improvement.” She is also responsible for facilitating risk assessment, transaction-level testing, and document compilation which will be forwarded to Augie Maurelli and President Ryan for final review and submission to the Agency for Risk Management and Internal Control Standards (ARMICS).

While the idea of internal control might seem a bit vague to some people, Clara knows it is essential to any business. “The internal control of an organization is like the immune system of a human body,” Clara explains. “And during a pandemic, there is no need to emphasize the importance of a healthy immune system, right? With a robust immune system, we don’t get sick as easily, and if we do, we recover faster. This is similar to what robust internal controls can provide: an improvement to operational efficiency and the furthering of our objectives to safeguard assets, an increase in the reliability of financial statements, the promotion of compliance, and the realization of other goals.”

Clara is already diving in and looking forward to all the challenges and opportunities ahead of her. “The AMRICS certification was changed this year," Clara says, providing an example of a current challenge she is working through. "I have been working closely with Lynn Galasso to figure out the new certification. She’s been sharing her extensive knowledge and experience with me without reservation!” In addition to working with Lynn, Clara is glad that her role will allow her to be involved with lots of business processes and teams.

She is particularly interested in what the implementation of Workday Financials means for internal control. “While making improvements to our business operations, we need to consider internal control throughout the design, testing, and implementation process,” she explains. “I’ve sat in a series of Workday meetings; it is impressive to see how much the team has already achieved. And I'm glad that I can contribute to the UVAFinance team by working with everyone to strengthen UVA’s internal control.”

Outside of work, Clara is kept busy by her nine-year-old daughter and seven-year-old son. When she does find time for herself, she enjoys reading and learning new things. She particularly loves non-fiction books about parenting, business, and data analysis.

Fall Fling: RSVP by September 10

 

PLEASE BE SURE to RSVP by the deadline so we may appropriately prepare for your attendance.
RSVP at vpfinance@virginia.edu

Join us on September 28, from 11 am to 1 pm, in Carruthers Hall's Lower North lot, as we eat, drink, and celebrate!