FST Update September 10, 2021

 

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Workday Financials 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 review will begin in February, featuring a new version of the tenant that contains the adjustments found in end-to- end.  That round of testing will include a wider group of representatives from the University.

Starting in this week’s blog digest, we’ll have a regular “testing tracker” post in the blog to keep everyone up to date on testing.

Reporting & Analytics Focus Groups

A focus group of members from around Grounds has met a couple of times now to get the perspective of those who use reports on a daily basis.  The group reviews reports constructed in Workday Financials to make sure they fit the intended purpose and that they’re suitable and usable, and to understand the trade-offs between UBI and Workday functionality. Read more on the blog.

FST Decisions old and new

PaymentWorks goes live at the end of this month.  This system replaces Jaeggar in supplier management.  Read the full update here.   Procurement will continue to do lots of communication about this and is absolutely happy to answer questions, so please feel free to reach out to them with any concerns.

Procurement also recently launched optical character recognition for invoices.  The adoption of OCR means that they can process supplier invoices more quickly and accurately and not rely on manual entry. Read more about OCR on the blog.

The buyer team in Procurement is restructuring their approach to category management so that they can better meet UVA’s needs.  Read more about their continuous improvement approach.

 In RAPID news, there’s an interesting question being proposed on the budget side of things, which is “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?”  Basically, if we did move to “hard funding,” as a model like this is called, units would have the ability to report on fund available without having to wait for year-end settlement and carryforward calculations.  Read more about the particulars.

Other Decision News: Check out this blog piece about salary certification, a recent RAPID decision that should ease administrative burden on effort reporting.  Keep up to date on FST decisions on the FST Decision Log.

Training

Not only is the Training Team working on logging business processes and associated tasks to determine what kind of training will be needed for each, but also, they have been working on mapping security roles to business roles as well as hosting some focus group sessions with our longtime UVA colleagues who were here for the implementation of Oracle, 20 years ago.  Read more on training.