University Business - July 2010 - (Page 57)

HUMAN RESOURCES Update on ERP systems, information systems, and more in campus HR oﬃces HR Technology: Today and Tomorrow By Carol Patton sonable pricing, and that as a separate system that contained conﬁdential employee information, HR would be the only department that could access it. HR now controls what data its roughly 9,000 employees see. For example, employees can only view job applications pertaining to their department; passwordprotected guest-user accounts allow members of hiring teams access. is eliminates the labor-intensive task of copying them, then forwarding to hiring departments. In the fall, the same system will be used to track the hiring of approximately 2,000 student employees. “ is will give us a lot of ﬂexibility and make us more eﬃcient,” Stoss says. “Before, when everything was paper-based, things got lost. We would need one full-time employee to keep up with the volume of resumes.” MORE CHOICES At some institutions, the idea of separate systems would never ﬂy. Compatible software is “extremely important” at the University of Utah since its inhouse technical resources are limited, says Loretta Harper, chief HR oﬃcer at the school that employs approximately 18,000 workers. While the HR department uses Oracle’s PeopleSoft as its HRIS, she says the company doesn’t oﬀer an applicant tracking system for staﬀ and faculty, so the department is purchasing compatible software from another vendor. “My preference would have been to use an applicant tracking module [by PeopleSoft],” she says, since software programs created Carol Patton is a Las Vegas-based freelance writer who specializes in covering HR issues. July/August 2010 | 57 S O MANY CHOICES, SO MANY decisions. Campus HR professionals face decisions about how to enhance their technology systems to streamline business processes. Purchase new software or tweak existing HR modules? Help vendors build a compatible interface for a program or design it in-house? e list of decisions is long, the number of options longer. Besides introducing new software and HR modules for enterprise resource planning systems (ERPs) or Human Resource Information Systems (HRISs), vendors are partnering with each other to create compatible software and encouraging institutions to look at system features they never knew they had. SunGard Higher Education recently enhanced its Banner HR system by releasing the Eﬀort Reporting and Labor Redistribution module. It’s an eﬀort certiﬁcation system that helps institutions monitor how much time employees spend on federal research grants. Since personnel costs typically represent the largest expense charged to federal grants or awards, the government requires that IHEs receiving federal funds establish a process for obtaining eﬀort certiﬁcations for employees whose salaries are paid under research grants. is system generates a report based on payroll history tables that calculates the amount of time reported by staﬀ per grant. Florida Atlantic University, which supports 5,000 employees, went live with the module in April, says Edwin Bemmel, director of research accounting. “Not only was the cost signiﬁcantly less compared to buying a separate piece of software, but because it’s integrated into our ERP system, it made it more easy An automated payroll system slashes the time it takes for new employees to receive their ﬁrst paycheck almost in half. to implement,” he says, adding that his oﬃce worked closely with HR to implement the module. “One of the features I really love is, when you’ve gone through the process of certifying your eﬀorts, it locks the record. You can unlock it, but not without my oﬃce being involved.” A few years ago, SunGard and PeopleAdmin partnered to integrate PeopleAdmin’s Applicant Tracking product into SunGard’s Banner HR. e system was implemented by Miami University (Ohio), says Kate Stoss, director of compensation, employment, and technology. Its three programs—an applicant tracking system, a position description module, and a performance management module—interact with each other. Stoss’s department worked with the vendors to build the program’s interface so that it would be compatible with the school’s HRIS, Banner. But even if it wasn’t compatible, Stoss says she still would have purchased it due to its features and rea- universitybusiness.com http://www.universitybusiness.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of University Business - July 2010

Univertsity Business - July 2010
Contents
Editor’s Note
College Index
Company Index
Advisory Board
Behind the News
Sense of Place
Community Colleges
Viewpoint
Money Matters
Annual Directory of Higher Education Consultants
Human Resources
Models of Efficiency
Lecture Capture: Policy and Strategy
Projecting New AV
Land Mines Ahead
End Note

University Business - July 2010