SUBJECT:

UC-Wide PPS Initiative

Our current Payroll Personnel System (PPS) has been in use for nearly 30 years, with different instances running at each of the UC campus locations. They are not operating as efficiently as they could be, or providing the University with optimal decision support data. As a result, last summer the Campus Controllers, Chief Human Resource Officers, and Academic Personnel Directors completed an initial assessment of the functionality and effectiveness of our payroll system and recommended that we begin planning for a more modern replacement.

Accordingly, the University has begun a project to identify a new approach to our payroll operations. The goal is to eventually have all UC employees paid from a single University wide payroll system that satisfies the core needs of each location while also bringing the efficiencies, improved data, and cost-savings associated with a unified system.

Please refer to Blink at http://blink.ucsd.edu/go/ucpps for more information about the project governance structure, the project plan, and President Mark Yudof's endorsement and request for your participation.

A project management workgroup, comprised of Controllers, Chief Human Resources Officers, Academic Personnel Directors, and Medical Center representatives, has been formed to guide and execute the project. Towers Watson, a consulting firm with a demonstrated track record of "best practices" in systems development for payroll, human resources, and academic personnel has been engaged, and a dedicated Project Director, Anthony Lo, has also been hired to lead this effort.

We want to thank those of you in the nearly fifty departments at UC San Diego who have already begun to support this project by recently responding to a payroll function survey. The results of those surveys will be very important as we begin to define the requirements for a new, state-of-the-art payroll system and process.

If you have any questions regarding the project, please consult Blink for updates on the project status, or contact our campus leaders who are closely supporting the effort: Don Larson, Controller (dlarson@ucsd.edu), Tom Leet, Assistant Vice Chancellor, Human Resources (tleet@ucsd.edu), or Kristina Larsen, Assistant Vice Chancellor, Academic Personnel (klarsen@ucsd.edu). Thanks again for your current and future efforts to help make this project successful.

Steven W. Relyea Vice Chancellor External and Business Affairs