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UPDATE: July 2, 2007
Banner Finance Live! The big news for June was the successful launch of Banner Finance. As of now, all fiscal year 08 transactions are being processed in Banner. This means all purchase requisitions and purchase orders and any payments made by the University. The Finance Team is still busy, though, with post go-live items, planning for the roll-out of some additional Banner Finance elements, and working with the rest of Business & Finance on closing FY07 in Plus.Congratulations to our Finance Team for their hard work in brining Banner Finance live on June 1!

UPDATE: May 7, 2007
Purchasing to start using Banner : This week Purchasing is scheduled to start using Banner for processing FY08 purchase requisitions and purchase orders. This is considered a "soft" launch of Banner Finance, which is scheduled to go live June 1. Having Purchasing using Banner is a key milestone as it indicates the bulk of the new Chart of Accounts is ready. Good luck to the Purchasing staff!

UPDATE: April 16, 2007
Job Scheduling in the works: This week key members of the ITS team are working with consultants on the installation and configuration of Appworx.  Appworx is a software tool for scheduling various jobs, such as reports or batch jobs, and is integrated with our Banner environment.  Right now, all jobs are managed manually by our Operations team.  Eventually Appworx will help us streamline how we manage and organize job scheduling and allow us to improve efficiencies.


UPDATE: April 5, 2007
Banner Advancement is LIVE!!! Congratulations to the Advancement Implementation Team on their successful launch of Banner Advancement!  As the first product to go live as part of Project BOB, Advancement was faced with the added challenge of the technology being new for both them and the ITS team.  Kudos to them for their patience and professionalism.  Congratulations are also due the ITS team that was responsible for the building of entirely new technology infrastructure required for the new Project BOB environment.  Their work is not yet done, but this was a huge piece needed for the Banner Advancement launch.

UPDATE: March 16, 2007
Human Resources Kickoff! The big news right now for Project BOB is the start of the Human Resources implementation. HR team members attended their project kick-off the week of February 19. They are already moving along at a rapid pace just a few weeks after their kick-off.

New Date for Advancement Launch: We have determined a new date for the launch of Banner Advancement -- Tuesday, March 27. This new go live date does not impact the June go-live dates for Banner Finance or the Admissions portion of Banner Student.

 

UPDATE: January 29, 2007
Busy, busy, busy! It has been a while since we provided an update on Project BOB. While many team members are working hard on their tasks or in training/consulting sessions, some highlights include the building of the production hardware environment, Advancement data conversion efforts, and getting single sign-on via USFconnect working.

New Date for Advancement Launch: We have determined a new date for the launch of Banner Advancement -- Tuesday, March 13. This new go live date does not impact the June go-live dates for Banner Finance or the Admissions portion of Banner Student.

 

UPDATE: October 25, 2006
Finance and Student Going Strong! In September both the Finance and Student Implementation Teams began their focused SunGard training and consulting. Finance will be going-live June 1, 2007, so they will be in intensive training for about 10 months. Student, a much longer implementation, will have its first module, Admissions, go-live in June as well, but Student will not be fully implemented until July of 2008. That means they will be spending 23 months in training and consulting as they configure Banner for our business needs. The end result will be worth the effort, though, as we will end up with a much more efficient administrative system.

 

UPDATE: September 25, 2006
Accessing Data Heats Up! During the week of September 11, numerous individuals from various business units came together to participate in sessions focused on University data needs. Banner is a relational database in that all our systems that now stand alone will work together. How we get data from Banner will be much different from how we currently get data from our Plus system. These reporting focused sessions will provide information to SunGard to help us determine how to implement our reporting and information access strategy to best meet the needs of the University. To see a short power point presentation on one element of our new reporting and information access strategy, please check out our section on the Project BOB intraweb.

 

UPDATE: August 23, 2006
Believe it or Not! As of Sept. 1, we will be in month 9, or 25% of the way there. Of course, being a quarter of the way through Project BOB doesn't tell us much about how far we have really come. In actuality, we are still just revving up. Advancement has been going strong since the project started and is scheduled to go live in February of 2007. By October, though, we will have three of the five product implementation teams actively involved in training and consulting sessions and in building/configuring Banner to meet the University's business needs: Advancement, Finance and Student. The Technical Team is moving along side all the product implementation teams, making sure they learn the necessary skills to support the Banner Suite and ensuring we have a stable infrastructure in place. Overall, we are making great progress and team members across the board are working hard to make this project a success!

 

UPDATE: July 31, 2006
Process This! Business Process Analysis (BPA) continues to play an important part in the initial stages of Project BOB. All our project teams -- Advancement, Finance, Human Resources, Student and Financial Aid -- are performing current-state (the way it is now) BPAs of key business processes. These current-states will be used during the configuration of Banner to help determine how our processes will be implemented in the new environment and where we might be able to infuse our processes with best practices.

Teresa Zane, shown below, a member of the Finance Implementation Team, decorates her cube with a process flow-chart and notes taken during a BPA interview session -- though soon all that information will be documented in a word file. For more on BPAs and why they are important to our project, please check out our Summer Newsletter article, "Preparing for Improvement".

UPDATE: July 20, 2006
Xtender -- easy document management awaits! One of the more exciting features integrated into Project BOB is its exceptional document management capability. Through the use of the Banner-integrated product called Xtender -- a best of breed document management system -- we will be able to take electronic documents and associate them to records within Banner. Among the many benefits of a digital document management system, Xtender will improve our organization and retrieval of related documentation simply with the click of a button. For more information please read our article, "Paper Here, Paper There, Paper Nowhere", in the summer edition of the BOB Newsletter.

UPDATE: June 19, 2006
 Major Milestone Achived! On May 26, we achieved our milestone of setting the go-live date for the Banner Advancement product and for the consequent decommissioning of the SCT+ ADS system to be the week of February 19, 2007. This date was determined after a careful review by the Advancement and ITS teams and considered issues related to business risk, technology platform readiness, staff readiness, cost, and overall project impact of the prospective launch windows.

While the core critical Banner technology infrastructure and associated Advancement migration efforts remain on-track and must be completed by Fall 2006, February 2007 offers a lower risk option to launch both Advancement core and associated in-scope non-core services (e.g. ODS reporting).

UPDATE: June 12, 2006
Preparing for data conversion: Last week Project BOB had its first training related to the conversion of our existing data into the new Banner environment. Each product area - Advancement, Finance, Financial Aid, Human Resources and Student - will go through their own conversion effort. The conversion effort is one of the more complex elements of the migration to the new system as it requires each area cleaning up the existing data as much as possible, determining what data and how much of it will be converted, mapping the existing fields to the corresponding fields within Banner and finally careful review of the data to ensure accuracy before the data is moved into the production environment.

UPDATE: June 1, 2006
What are those BOB folks doing these days? Over the past several weeks team members have begun performing BPAs (Business Process Analysis). Advancement has actually completed their core "current state" BPAs (woo hoo!) and will soon be meeting with their functional consultant to decide on the "improved state" for the identified business processes. The other teams will be doing the same later along in the implementation process.

Another big event just begun is the evaluation of our document management needs. Document management includes attaching documents, scanned or electronic, to records in the new Banner system allowing for centralized access and improved security. This evaluation includes identifying the types of documents we would want to associate within Banner as well as determining storage requirements an scanning hardware needs.

UPDATE: May 8, 2006
And so we begin Month 6... May is the sixth month of Project BOB, meaning we are about 14% complete. Okay, that isn't the most meaningful of numbers just yet, but it is key in that we are truly progressing with the project. We are on schedule and where we anticipated we would be at this point and we are moving along at a good clip. A lot will be happening this month -- more technical training, some formal business process analysis and Advancement consulting -- so keep your eyes peeled for news.

UPDATE: April 18, 2006
Reporting on the move... This week several members of the Advancement and Technical Teams are attending Oracle Discoverer training. Discoverer is our reporting tool for the new ERP system and should meet the bulk of our reporting needs. One of the key benefits of Banner is its reporting capabilities. It will be much easier to pull information from the system to help in tracking and planning, end-users will have more control over the information they want to report on, and because data is shared and we'll be implementing an Operational Data Store there will be greater likelihood of accurate information.

UPDATE: April 12, 2006
And so we continue along... Summit Attendees are back at home after a successful trip to Orlando. The conference provided a lot of information that we'll be able to make use of as we continue our implementation of Banner. But it wasn't all work -- here's a picture of some of us at the Summit Big Event at Animal Kingdom.


(from left: Beth Forest, Arceil Juranty, Nadav Aharonov, Kristopher Young, Arthur Arevalo, Iwan Sutana)

This week a handful of Tech Team members attend Banner Administration training. So far the word is they are learning lots of cool stuff! Looking ahead, next week we have our first Oracle Discoverer training (Discoverer is our reporting tool or choice).

UPDATE: April 3, 2006
SunGard Summit 2006: This week several team members are at the SunGard Summit 2006 Conference in Orlando, Florida. A mere 7,500 attendees, Summit is one of the largest educational conferences around. Numerous sessions related to our five products - Advancement, Finance, Human Resources, Student and Financial Aid - as well as ones related to USFconnect, workflow, and our document management solution are taking place and those attending are doing their best to absorb as much information as possible to help in our implementation.

UPDATE: March 27, 2006
Monthly Status Report Available: Last week we had our first Project BOB Steering Committee Meeting. Among the topics was review our our first project status report. Feel free to check out the status report or review the individual monthly status reports!

On the agenda for this week is the start of our Banner General Technical Training. While our technical group has already had some Oracle training to prep for Project BOB, this is our first Banner-specific training.

UPDATE: March 15, 2006
Project BOB is off and running. So far this month we have completed Business Process Analysis (BPA) training, which will be core to our implementation of Banner. Advancement had their kick-off training session the week of March 6 and will be having their second training session next week. We have also begun addressing data standards -- such as what ethnicity codes will be used, how addresses will be formated, etc. -- through the Banner General Team.

UPDATE: February 13, 2006
The Project Kick-Off meeting last week was a big success! Of particular note, the Implementation Teams voted on a project name. The ERP Project is now officially dubbed Project BOB (for Banner on Board). This week we begin Banner General, which will cover new data standards required for an integrated system such as Banner.

UPDATE: February 6, 2006
Kick-Off Meeting scheduled for this week, Tuesday and Wednesday, from 1 - 5 pm.

UPDATE: January 10, 2006
Project has officially begun and the project's kick-off meeting has been scheduled for early February!

UPDATE: December 1, 2005
We have signed our contract with SunGard SCT! We will be starting the project this month! YAHOO!!!

UPDATE: September 2, 2005
An ERP vendor finalist has been identified! View the ERP Procurement Team Recommendation Report (log in with your USFconnect username and password).

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