Introducing UVAFinance is a recurring blog feature created to introduce our team to our team, a couple of members at a time. Every other week, we present readers with a team member or two to get to know.
Resource: UVAFinance by Department
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| Andrew Sallans |
What do you do as Director of Business Services and Systems?
My job is to lead the team to develop processes and systems that help the UVAFinance team get done what they need to get done. My portfolio includes four internal operations areas in UVAFinance: LSP team (staff and conference room technology support), business services (central administrative support, onboarding/offboarding), business systems (non-Workday business systems support such as Salesforce and Drupal), and the Finance Solution Center (Tier One AskFinance customer support). Day-to-day, this means a lot of task switching. As an example, I'm currently working with the LSP team on technology refreshes and upgrades for new conference rooms and new hoteling software, the business services team on return to office furniture and accessories, as well as account certification streamlining, the business systems team on webform maintenance and Salesforce licensing enhancements, and the Finance Solution Center team on how to streamline tier 2 functional workload. It is often a mix of project planning, strategy, and hands-on problem solving. Each day brings new surprises and challenges.
Who are the people/departments you work with regularly?
I work daily with my managers, their team members, and staff from across SFS functional teams. The LSP team (Linda Estepp, Micah Boothe, led by Michael Hayton), Business Services team (Ann Paxton, Rasha Ahmad, led by Stacey Rittenhouse), and Business Systems team (Meredith Dixon, Ben Tolson, led by Jamie Reid) mostly serve internal UVAFinance staff, while the Finance Solution Center (Dawn Wood, Kellyn Morris, Guillermo López, Eric Lunnen, led by Joey Carls) partners closely with functional area staff and primarily serves schools, departments, and suppliers.
What seasons are busiest, or what rhythms exist in your job?
As internal support areas, our work volume relates directly to those who we support. The LSP team, Business Services, and Business Systems teams all have a steady volume of requests to manage, and then see fluctuation as teams and the organization take on new initiatives. Those requests are a mix of troubleshooting/transactional tasks and longer-term development/project priorities. The Finance Solution Center currently sees about 600 cases a week (down from closer to 1,000 cases a week around Workday launch). This volume is driven by a number of factors, including: which processes the team is supporting, work schedules for those seeking support (lower case volume during summer vacation season, higher around the start of semesters), deadlines (tax-prep season), billing schedules (high volume automated billing notices at the start of each month), and system problems (when things break unexpectedly).
What might surprise people about the work you do/this role/your department or area?
My portfolio also includes managing the relationships with the University Associated Organizations. This area entails keeping track of UAO contacts, reporting requirements, liaising on issues with UGC, helping UAOs navigate use of UVA services, and ultimately execution of the annual certification process, where we ensure that the terms of the MOU between UVA and each UAO are met. Joey and I now work on this together. We draw up our experience across operations, technology, and customer experience.
What do you like best about working in UVAFinance?
UVA is a big organization, with so many pieces, and so many new challenges and requirements to meet all the time. UVAFinance is right in the middle of it and embraces doing the right thing and creating a foundation for success. I've been around UVA for 20+ years now and really enjoy the energy and pace of change here in UVAFinance, and working with a great group of people who are also eager to improve processes. I joined in 2020 during the build-up to Workday and have appreciated being part of the post-launch efforts to improve.
How do you connect your work with the UVAFinance Values?
I see the UVAFinance values in everything that my teams do. I always try to approach problems from the perspective of the customer, as if I were the customer. How would I want to be treated? What do I find to be the best experience versus the most frustrating? What is the customer's actual goal or problem, and what can we do to try and address that? How can we build services and systems that make for a smoother customer experience and are more efficient for us to manage? If we approach support with these types of questions in mind, then I think we are living the values. As service providers, it's entirely about what we do AND how we do it.
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| Addie Coe |
What do you do as Director of Procurement Operations?
I help ensure that procure-to-pay tools and all of our downstream processes, including AP, invoicing, payments, and spend analysis, are working properly for both internal users (departments) as well as external users (suppliers). I also work to make sure that we are gathering the appropriate metrics and data to inform decision-making. For example, with spend analysis, I look to see what we're spending money on, how we're spending our money, and how suppliers are onboarded. My team shares this information with other parts of Procurement such as Supplier Diversity and Strategic Sourcing to help them make informed decisions about strategies, tools, and other resources that support procure-to-pay.
Who are the people/departments you work with on a regular basis?
We work very closely with the Workday Support Team, the Finance Solutions Center, and Fiscal Administrators all across Grounds. With the Workday Support Team, we help to bring the functional use of the system, while they bring their technical expertise. We collaborate to enhance our business processes in Workday and fix anything that's broken with the system. With the Fiscal Administrators, we do a lot of education about what the invoice-to-payment situation looks like, how it functions, and how the administrators can participate in its function to ensure the best outcome. The team answers many questions about invoices, payments, and suppliers. There is a lot of focus on customer service when it comes to FA!
What seasons are busiest, or what rhythms exist in your job?
By far, fiscal year end is always the busiest time, along with every January when tax season rolls around.
What might surprise people about the work you do/this role/your department or area?
I think people would be surprised by how much compliance, legislation, and Risk Management affect what we do and the decisions we make. Everything we do within procurement is governed by state laws that outline everything that is allowable when we spend money. There is also a restructuring agreement that has some exceptions to that procurement code, which gives us a little more autonomy, but, there's still a rule that any deviations from it in the procurement code must be uniform across all restructured agreement schools. We have a consortium with other schools that details how we work with this and the governing rules within VASCUPP. When we make choices about what is allowed and how things function, we're governed by overarching legislation. This affects how we pay, the methods we pay, and the timeframe of paying.
Risk Management plays a part is supplier onboarding and maintenance, like holding, storing, and having access to people's personal information. Suppliers provide us with a great detail of personal information to do business with us, and we have a responsibility to safeguard this information. We also have a responsibility to ourselves to make sure we aren't adjusting or editing that information- only the supplier has this ability as there are certain risks involved. Additionally, when we purchase new software and share data with companies, things have to be reviewed through Risk Management. Just because something is useful doesn't mean it's safe!
What do you like best about working in UVAFinance?
UVAFinance has a culture of creativity and innovation where ideas are not only shared but also widely considered and acted on. I have lots of ideas, so this is a wonderful facet of working here! In many workspaces, ideas aren't as welcomed, so UVAFinance is greatly advanced in this vein. People here are really interested in hearing ideas from others. Whether or not action results from these ideas, there is a sense of genuine curiosity and consideration. There is a lot of freedom to try new things at UVAFinance.
How do you connect your work with the UVAFinance Values?
Much of our work is centered around collaborative partnerships. We are charged with the very beginning of the procurement process (supplier onboarding) and the very end (paying our suppliers), and when assessing the health and effectiveness of these processes, the ultimate goal is to serve our partners across Grounds and adhere to the wider mission of the university. A large part of this job is learning what our partners need, discussing possibilities with them, and working together to create a reality that serves everyone's interests in the best way possible.
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Would you like to be featured in Introducing UVAFinance? Want to suggest a colleague to be featured? Email bv8h@virginia.edu
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