University upgrades its computer system with UI-Integrate and Banner
For over 30 years, the University of Illinois has been using a, now archaic, Surplus mainframe computer to run out-of-date software called Legacy to facilitate student registration, financial aid, human resources and payroll tasks.
The computer and software systems of today are infinitely faster and more efficient then those envisioned only but a decade earlier, yet even the current computers of today are more then outdated in less the six months after their conception.
It is this notion that has driven the University to upgrade its antiquated mainframes to more efficient and modern computer systems. They upgrade in a quest to smooth the progress of daily operation and business at the University while promoting a better wellbeing for both faculty and the students.
"The University had just gone as far as it could with the old software," said Chet Gardner, vice president of academic affairs. The systems were breaking down and becoming more unreliable by the day, he said.
In the fall of 1999, a committee of some 200 members of the campus community recommended SunGard SCT, an information technology company headquartered in Malvern, Penn., and its Banner2000 program as the best business software package to fit the ideals and intentions of the Universities intended upgrade.
The committee looked at all aspects of the most popular and well known software packages; everything from finance, to human resources, to student services; and they recommended SCT and their Banner product Gardner continued.
"But then, we said, look, they've never sold a package to a major research university, especially one that's this large -- we have three campuses -- we don't know if [the program] can handle the load," Gardner said.
"Before we selected this program, we did a major load test out at Sun Microsystems in California, in the spring of 2000," Gardner continued. "We took our staff out there, SCT went out there, and we simulated the payroll and student registration operations in Banner out there for a week. We did numerous load tests to make sure that this piece of software could handle the load from three campuses," he said.
Once we were convinced the program would work for our needs and with our system, we went into negotiations to get the necessary modifications made to the program that we needed specifically for the University, Gardner finished.
The Board of Trustees then voted on the system in the September of 2001 to be the successor of the Legacy systems.
Thus the University launched UI-Integrate; formally know as the Enterprise Resource Program. It was an initially projected, five year, $197 million expenditure -- later lowered to $186 million -- to upgrade the Universities outdated systems while centralizing the computer systems and programs of the University of Illinois across each of its three campuses at Chicago, Urbana-Champaign and Springfield.
39.7 percent of the $186 million went toward project staffing and sight. 20 percent of the total project expense went toward the hardware and software, as well as implementation assistance. The rest of the budget was allocated between the necessary modifications to the University infrastructure and renting training facilities.
There are two locations on campus that offer introductory to advanced levels of training for the Banner system in Champaign: 704. S. Sixth St. and 111 E. Green St.
In an effort to insure the Banner system would meet users' needs, the project teams for UI-Integrate collaborated with University employees through focus groups, issue resolution sessions and conference room training pilots.
"At the peak of the project, we had nearly 400 people working full-time just implementing," said Gardener.
To help communications between the University community and the UI-Integrate project teams, the unit liaison program was incorporated into the implementation process. The focus of unit liaisons is to help assess their units' preparedness as modules are readied for implementation, and have also helped validate personnel training needs within certain department areas.
The University chose the best system available for the needs of the faculty, but more importantly, they chose the best system they could find for the students, said Nicole Udzenija, communications coordinator for UI-Integrate communications and project office.
The centralized system saves the University money and allows each of the campuses to have flexibility when customizing the Banner program to their needs, said Tom Hardy, executive director for university relations.
The system provides a better wide-area network linking the three campuses together, Hardy said.
The system also incorporates a self-service, Web-browser-based, functionality for use by the students and the University faculty.
"There are a number of reasons why we had to initiate [the implementation of a new system]," said Gardner. "We had close to 150 different business software packages that were used on the three campuses to conduct our business..." and none of them talked to each other.
"If you made a change in one, it only affected that one set of software," Gardner said.
"On [the Urbana-Champaign] campus alone, we had 44 different business software packages that had student names, telephone numbers, and addresses in it, and none of them talked to one another," said Gardner. So if a student wanted to change an address, we'd have to go through and change the address in every other software system we had."
"In our office of admissions and records, and in financial aid, the return mail volume averaged 35 to 40%, simply because we didn't have accurate and up to date addresses," Gardner said.
The major goal of the system is to really come up with better business processes that are more streamlined, that result in more timely data, more accurate data, and that follow best practices in higher education, said Margaret Krol, UI-Integrate project director.
UI-Integrate as a whole is currently on schedule for completion at the end of this year said Gardner. "We've been able to stay on the original schedule and we're within the budget of the original envision for the system."
"From the whole perspective of the university, the project has gone well. The challenges that we have faced, we knew we would face once we initiated this project, the biggest challenge has been to get people familiar with how to use the new system," Gardner said.
Banner is certainly effecting everyone's work day said Bob Andersen, associate director of student financial aid and former UI-Integrate lead for financial aid implementation.
"We are very much an administrative shop; and so even people that never had to get onto our financial aid system, because they did payroll, or because they did something else in our office... are finding that they also need to use banner on a daily basis because, they need to put their time sheets in on the self-service site," Andersen said.
Banner is very useful for looking up information because for once, it's all at the touch of your fingertips without the hassle of having to deal with different programs, Andersen said.
"In fact we've gone pretty much paperless in our operation now with Banner," Andersen continued. "We image all documents coming in for student financial aid. All supporting documents are imaged; so when students come in for counseling, everything is available on Banner whether we need to read a record or look at comments... everything is right there."
"Our file room, is used now just to keep track of the imaged paper incase there's some error, so we can go out and get it again... [Banner] has really changed our way of doing business quite a bit," Andersen said.
We used to have a standalone financial aid system, a standalone registration system, a standalone accounts receivable system, a separate assessment system, and each program made you sign into a number of different products using completely different interfaces said Andersen.
We had to remember social security numbers all the time because they would not transport the numbers from one program to another said Andersen. "What we are seeing now I think, is that our biggest help has been our integration," allowing us to check multiple kinds of information without having to constantly reenter the same information into a different product and interface said Andersen.
"One of the reasons that we decided to implement Banner, was because the student services packages, the modules and the software for student services, was superb," said Gardner.
We and SCT have worked very closely together throughout the implementation process said Gardner. About every four or five months, University administration officials met up with the senior executives from SCT to address any problems that were occurring in the implementation and to keep highest levels of management at SCT aware of it.
"When we negotiated the contract with SCT, there was some functionality, some thing's that we needed to do as a major research university that the original version of Banner could not do," Gardner said.
"When we negotiated the contract with SCT, they agreed to modify their baseline software, to add this functionality. Some 60 different things that we needed to do, that was specific to the University of Illinois, and they agreed to make those modifications, and then incorporate it in the baseline software, so that, as future upgrades of the software came out, that those modifications would be maintained," Gardner said.
"We (also) worked with SCT to develop a contemporary messaging architecture for adapting third party software to Banner," he continued. "We actually copyrighted that architecture, formed a Limited Liability Corporation called Open Source Enterprise Application Integration (Open EAI), an open source software protocol that any company can use, and then licensed that to SCT. In December, SCT will issue a version of their Banner that's based upon this architecture."
"We will actually get some royalties from the first ten versions of this software that SCT sells, but the real importance here, is that it's a contemporary architecture that will make it very easy for third party vendors to provide additional functionality that can interface with Banner in a very easy format," Gardner said. "We felt that, for the future of the university this would be very beneficial to us"
By using an open source interface and allowing third party vendors to develop additional software for Banner, the program becomes much more versatile as companies can customize their own programs to perform new tasks.
This development would be the equivalent to third-party companies developing additional software for Microsoft Windows, thus making the base program more lucrative and important for Microsoft while adding a huge selection of versatility to what the system will be capable of.
When we started this project, "we had expected the state would provide some money to fund this project, so then we got hit by these budget cuts and we had to find a way to pay for it," Gardner said.
"We knew going in that it would be a challenge, but we didn't expect the budget cuts and all the employee layoffs to contribute to the stress that would happen. But I'm very pleased with where we are now, and I'm also very pleased when students tell me they like the registration system," Gardner finished.
Though people had a bit of trouble with the system at first, "I think over time that people will learn the value of the system as they become more familiar, and obviously people will get used to it more, making it easier," said Hardy.
"Even with the older systems, they weren't always reliable and we ran into problems. As change occurs within the university you'll have the range of experiences, as people get used to [Banner] they will appreciate the system more with time," Hardy finished.
SCT is currently the largest software provider in the world to Universities.
They have almost 2,000 clients worldwide that run some portion of Banner, but the University of Illinois is by far the largest and most complex implementation in which they've engaged, said Udzenija.
At a recent higher education conference, the University officials presented the Banner implementation program. Since then, various schools -- such as Virginia Tech -- have shown interest in adopting the implementation program and have contacted SCT and the University, said Laura Knivge, director of communications for SunGard SCT.
The Banner software system implementation affects only the human resource, finance and student administrations systems. It does not affect applications such as building access, parking, desktop software or e-mail.