University upgrades its computer system: UI-Problems
Contrary to the popular, problem-riddled depiction that has plagued the University of Illinois' UI-Integrate effort, the implementation of SunGard SCT's Banner2000 program has gone smoothly after a few initial bumps were smoothed out.
"A lot of things that have been blamed on Banner, weren't Banner," said Chet Gardner, vice president of academic affairs.
"Last September, many students were late in getting notification of financial aid; the press... reported that this was because of this new business system and it was making mistakes; that was not the case. What happened was, the board of trustees didn't improve tuition increases until late in June," Gardner said.
"There's a certain amount of time we're allotted, there's a lot of work... We have 70,000 students at this university, and probably, 30 to 40,000 of them get some sort of financial aid," he continued.
"Figuring out what the financial aid is, getting letters sent out to notify the students, getting monies transferred into accounts to pay that financial aid takes weeks at best. And unfortunately, the board waited until the end of June to set the tuition, and then, the Illinois Student Assistance board made some changes in the awards that they decided to award for this fiscal year in July," Gardner finished.
"They had thought they were getting a certain amount of appropriations for '04, and unfortunately the governor cut those appropriations. So we had two things, setting tuition late, and making final decisions on MAP awards late, [those were] the reasons why we were late in apprising students of financial aid," Gardner finished
UI-Integrate has been a subject of controversy since its approval and planned implementation in July of 2001.
It was necessary to begin an update as soon as possible on our old computer systems because they were falling apart said David Ruzic, associate vice president for administration.
"Many of the computer systems dated back to the late 1960s and were on the verge of failing," said Randy Kangas, director of university planning and budgeting.
For such a large research university, "we needed a modern state of the art technology platform across the three University campuses," said Tom Hard, executive director for university relations.
"Last year alone, with the Legacy system, we averaged having to reissue 6,500 paychecks a month. The Legacy system didn't compute the pay checks correctly. This shows how bad the Legacy system was," Gardner said.
"In order to convert the things over to Banner, we had to take everybody's appointment, every employee, and convert it into a Banner appointment. How much is that person being paid, all of the information about that person: social security number etc... what bank accounts they get their money transferred to as well as what university accounts they are being paid from," said Gardner.
"The vast majority (of accounts) got converted properly; but we still had to have our staff manually check [them], to make sure, and that was a monumental task; but we had no choice. We had automatic programs that converted from our Legacy payroll to Banner, but to really be certain that employees got their correct pay, we had to manually check [all payroll appointments]," Gardner continued.
"There were some errors made there... in terms of entering payroll data into Banner, it's new, it's different and the staff that had to do it wasn't familiar with it. So that presented a challenge," Gardner said.
"Their lack of familiarity with the system has created some challenges, but in all fairness to our staff, it is true, that in the payroll end it's not very efficient to enter payroll data into Banner," Gardner expressed.
Now the reason for that is not that it's a bad system, but it was designed for smaller universities where there's a central payroll/human resources office where you have people where that's all they do said Margaret Krol, UI-Integrate project director.
"But you see at this university, it's right down at the department level; each department has business people that go through the process of appointing and directing payroll, and that's only a part of their job, and it's typically only a small part of their job," Gardner said.
"It's difficult for them to learn a fairly complex system. That's something though, that we're going to build some interfaces to simplify," Gardner finished.
I give the staff here the benefit of the doubt, they're still adjusting to a new computer system, said Ruzic.
The problem before Banner was that "we had a standalone financial aid system, a standalone registration system, a standalone accounts receivable system, a separate assessment system... everything forced you to, you had to sign on somewhere else, learn a new product with completely different interfaces, and different ways of dealing with the product, said, Bob Andersen, associate director of student financial aid and former UI-Integrate lead for financial aid implementation.
With the new Banner system however, there is a much stronger reliability and the most important administration programs are centralized into one system.
Now we have direct access and its all one interface, so we can keep one University Identification Number (UIN), and anytime I switch from one form to another form in the application, the number stays with that person, Anderson said. We no longer have to memorize social security numbers and keep reentering them into different programs.
"So I can jump to registration, accounts receivable, back to financial aid, and to admissions," without having to keep reentering information, Andersen said.
The serious problems that have arisen were a result of a decidedly acceptable, yet temporary, sacrifices.
"One of the reasons that we decided to implement Banner, was because the student services packages, the modules, the software for student services, was superb," said Gardner.
"We knew that the human resources portion that enables us to appoint employees and also to pay people wasn't as good as some of the other packages, but unfortunately, those other packages didn't have as good student services functionality," Gardner said.
UI Integrate is using the Banner to integrate the three major groups of University computer systems: student systems, human resources systems and the financial systems.
SunGard SCT, a Malvern, Penn., based information technology company, sold the University of Illinois their Banner2000 software after a committee, consisting of 200 people from the academic community researched and analyzed different business software packages in order to discover the most appropriate computer and software system to upgrade to, and approved it.
Once the program was validated through load tests to make sure it could handle the kind of online traffic a university the size of the University of Illinois three campuses -- Chicago, Urbana-Champaign, and Springfield -- would produce, negotiations began.
The negotiations between the University and SCT detailed that SCT would add "some 60 additional features onto their baseline product specifically for the University of Illinois..." said Gardner.
The original budget for the project was $197 million, but after a year into production, the budget decreased to $186 million.
"We started this project in September of 2001, and guess what, 6 months later, we had a rescission. 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"
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, Gardner expressed.
We're currently on schedule for completion at the end of the year, we've been able to stay on the original schedule, and we're within the budget of the original envision for the system, said Gardner.
"One of the things we did that our peers didn't [in budgeting is that] most of our peers had budgeted too little money, and they found midway through the project that they had to come up with tens of millions of additional funds in order to finish it," Garner said.
But one of the things we did was to personally budget the personnel costs. At the peak of the project, we had nearly 400 people working full-time just implementing. This doesn't include the time that staff had to go to class; these are people, specifically assigned to the UI-Integrate project. Whenever we got one of our employees to move over to the UI-Integrate project, their salaries stayed in their unit so that they could hire someone to fill in while they were working on the project.
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, said Gardner.
In financial aid, "one of the things we felt was kind of serious was that, [Banner] does (information) packaging differently then what we've been used to and the way we've done it in Illinois history," said Bob Andersen.
We've been able to figure out how to approximate the same rules and the same packaging, but it's not perfect, and it's not exactly the same, he continued.
One of the things we were worried about was that there would shifts of funds from, like person to like person, Andersen said.
We haven't really had problems with it, we left money back from our funding incase there were problems from skewed events, and luckily we didn't have that much. There were only a few students who came in with problems, but we were basically able to soften the blow an aid drop and took care of that situation, Andersen said.
"We have asked for another way to package our materials called algorithmic packaging, the other tables in Banner are percentage based and so you can only do so much when you have a list of things in a table. You can always approximate, but with algorithmic packaging you can get right down to the specifics and what get you want out of the equation," Andersen said.
Banner "takes more training and it takes more understanding, more work to get to that point where you can do the job the same or better," said Andersen.
We are currently starting to tune the self-service portion of Banner so it doesn't take quite as long for students, so far, that's the only problem I've heard about with self-service system, said Andersen.
Part of the problem with a new operation is that, the university has not streamlined the system to handle the load of traffic it's getting. More then 4000 students registered within the first two days of registration, and it was slow.
"What financial aid has been stuck with basically is that we can offer a student information on where they are in the process of aid, what forms they have submitted, their financial aid award if they've received one online, but it's only for the whole year, it doesn't show semester amounts. We can show them a bill, but that is about it," said Andersen.
"We were going to do paper for freshman, and everything online for continuing students.... but what happened was, that when students really started working with it, we felt they would get really confused because all we could do was display to them, their award for the whole year, it would be like 'PELL, 3000, MAP, 4000, direct loan, 2000, work study 1500,' but it couldn't tell them how much of that was for fall, or how much was for spring," Andersen said.
"We have lots of students that shift from being a senior to a graduate student... and their costs are different, their types of aid are different, and we couldn't show that. We can show them the whole year, but it would not show them how the money would be divided up amongst semesters, so we thought that by using that system, we were really going to confuse people," Andersen said.
Banner, in that respect is almost too simple, there aren't enough bells and whistles to customize its presentation, he continued.
"It's just not where it should be," said Andersen.
The problems the university has faced with the Banner implementation have most likely be due to the size of the University and the size of the project, said Laura Kvinge, director of communications for SunGard SCT.
The University is implementing the best system available for the needs of the faculty but most importantly for the students, Nicole Udzenija said, communications coordinator for UI-Integrate communications and project office.
"Our legacy systems were falling apart; the old payroll system was designed back in the 1960's, so that was over 30 years ago. We no longer have any employees working at the university who wrote the software system, they retired a few years ago," said Gardner.
"I think we all want to take baby-steps, so that we can get the job done. We're trying our very best to within what we have, to make it easy for the student to get around," finished Andersen.