UC Flex: Laying the Foundation
for the New Urban Research University
by Jim Mazur and Michelle Bankowski
In 2004, the University of Cincinnati launched an ambitious plan to help it successfully meet the demands and challenges facing higher education institutions in the twenty-first century. UC|21 sets out the vision, goals, and actions for transforming UC into the "New Urban Research University."
2004 also marked the beginning of another transformation initiative, UC Flex, the University's initiative to enhance Financial and Human Resources operations. On 5 July 2005, the first phase of the UC Flex system - UC Flex Financials - successfully went "live," bringing the University closer to realizing its overall vision. UC Flex advances the vision of UC|21 by providing a common and more robust platform for managing UC's complex programs with better, more accurate and real-time information.
"UC Flex will enable the University to operate more efficiently by allowing more resources to be dedicated to direct services," explains Dale McGirr, Senior VP for Planning, Finance and Community Development, and a UC Flex sponsor. "It will also aid in accurately assessing progress towards stated goals, and permit more flexible management of programs at the department level."
Moving Away from the "Silo" Approach
Numerous challenges facing public research universities highlight the need for UC to improve on many levels in order to survive. With traditional sources of public money - particularly State support - shrinking each year, there is intense competition for funds, grants, students, and faculty. UC's ability to achieve its goal of becoming the premier "New Urban Research University" depends on finding new approaches to its teaching, research, and service missions - and new ways of thinking about itself.
Traditionally, academia has divided itself into disciplines. Research has been characterized by highly focused and specialized activities within these disciplinary silos. Naturally, departments have organized and established management systems that reflect this "Silo Mentality."
Over the past twenty years, however, there has been increasing emphasis on collaboration across many specialized areas. It is not uncommon for research grants to include multiple disciplines to focus on a complex problem that may involve, for example, public policy, health care, and economics. Whereas a competitive research grant of twenty-five years ago may have requested applications from biochemists or immunologists, a grant of today is far more likely to also involve the medical college, the economics department, the business school, and the department of urban planning. If these departments all manage critical management data in fundamentally different ways, applying for and managing grants can be very cumbersome.
Worldwide, over 150 institutions of higher learning have already realized that shared, real-time data in a common data warehouse, allows each department to focus on its core expertise in executing the application or delivery of such grants. MIT, the University of Tennessee, Duke, the University of Nebraska, Penn State, Baylor Medical College, and Central Michigan University are among the many universities that have replaced their outdated, patchwork systems with SAP, an application that is used globally by both corporations and government agencies to integrate organization-wide data, and in the process connect the organization's parts into an enterprise.
Improving UC Involves both Technology and People
Although UC Flex involves replacing information systems, it is not "just another IT project." From the outset, the UC Flex initiative has been led by the UC colleges and departments to ensure their operational needs are met.
VP and Chief Information Officer Fred Siff, also a UC Flex sponsor, readily acknowledges the importance of ensuring that operational needs drive the project. "UC Flex will transform the UC enterprise by fundamentally changing both the technology and how people perform their day to day operational tasks. This requires that the people who actually do the work are involved in the planning and preparation activities. The mission of Information Technology is to provide the vehicle on which those enterprise needs are met, and in the most effective way possible."
UC Flex is replacing outdated finance and human resources systems with SAP to integrate many functions into one system that shares common data. This integration and sharing of a common data source is a fundamental change for UC, and one that will help it operate as a single entity, rather than a collection of colleges. The transformation of the enterprise begins even before the system goes live, as preparation activities require employees and managers to rethink all of UC's basic processes and procedures before the system is implemented.
UC has chosen to implement two modules. Finance went live in July 2005, affecting more than 1,000 core users of the system. Human Resources will initially affect nearly 500 core users, but when it goes live in July 2006, will impact all UC employees as most HR services will become available online, and manageable directly by the individual employee.
For Finance, the new system provides a single integrated source (for financial information) that reduces reconciliation, enables management reporting, reduces processing time, and provides insight into data on a University-wide basis.
For HR, the new system will support centralized and decentralized transaction processing, while providing major improvements in position tracking, management and control, recruitment, training, and development. Moreover, the HR and Finance systems will be fully integrated as separate modules in the same SAP application.
Specifically, UC Flex will replace the College and University Financial System (CUFS), Human Resources Management System (HRMS), and the Benefits Management System (BMS). It will streamline and standardize key business processes in Accounting, Budgeting, Grants, Endowments, Procurement, Personnel Administration, Organizational Management, Payroll, Time Management, Benefits Administration, Employee Self-Service, and Manager Self-Service.
In the future, UC Flex will also interface with PeopleAdmin, a new recruitment system; COEUS, UC's research administration system purchased from MIT; and the UniverSIS Student Billing and Receivables.
Supporting the Vision of UC|21
The connections between a tactical transformation like UC Flex and a large scale vision such as UC|21 are often not obvious. UC Flex will enable the UC|21 vision by removing many of the barriers to UC performing at a high level. Many of these barriers are characterized by excessive time and cost required to manage data that is overly decentralized.
"The current data management environment at UC is characterized by a multitude of separate systems at the University, the department, and even at the individual level," explains James Tucker, University VP for Business and Administrative Services, and UC Flex sponsor. "By getting our departments and colleges out of the business of managing data, they can spend more time focusing on their core missions, which benefits everyone. It also allows the University to act like an enterprise rather than a collection of colleges."
UC Flex will play an important role in helping UC to achieve the six major goals envisioned in UC|21:
- Place students at the center
- Grow our research excellence
- Achieve academic excellence
- Forge key relationships and partnerships
- Establish a sense of "place"
- Create opportunity
- Providing the Foundation for Continuous Improvement
By implementing the Finance (and Budget) and HR modules of SAP, UC Flex is also implementing the architectural framework of SAP. SAP is an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system that features a full suite of functional modules, any number of which could be easily added to the existing foundation in the future.
"To provide an analogy, implementing the full SAP system architecture to support the current implementation projects is the equivalent of building a foundation to support a twenty story office tower, but only starting out constructing the first... stories for immediate use," explains Dale McGirr. "UC will be able to take advantage of this initial investment for many years, by having the capability to easily add additional modules, with very incremental costs."
With the successful "go-live" of Finance (and Budget) on 5 July, the UC Flex era at the University of Cincinnati has begun. The new UC Flex system will help the University navigate a successful course into the future.
To learn more about UC Flex, please visit the UC Flex web site at http://www.uc.edu/ucflex.
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