Finance Systems Operations – Reviewing Issues and Progress

The transition to a modern financial management system has been and remains very taxing for our administrators and our research community. We would like to express our gratitude for their tremendous efforts and update the campus on the overall progress.

System improvements

Our various teams (Finance, ITS, Academic VCs) are collaborating with the Chancellor’s ESR Advisory Committee (co-chaired by Zea Borok and Vicki Grassian) to create a single list of issues so that faculty and staff can easily determine if the challenges they face have already been identified. If you have questions or concerns about this list, please contact Allorah Pradenas from the Office of Operational Strategic Initiatives (OSI).

Of the 50 issues reviewed so far, 14 have been resolved, and 4 have been verified by the Committee. The live progress report can be found at financialmanagement.ucsd.edu. We are thankful for the Committee’s work in helping identify, review, and resolve issues. Examples of issues being addressed include:

Improving financial report accuracy by adding data entry validation using WalkMe to reduce downstream fund manager workload (implemented)
Rebuilding the Faculty & Researcher Panorama in Cognos, leveraging the Financial Activity Hub to improve speed and performance (January target)
Reducing the Fund Manager workload by synchronizing the UCPath Labor Ledger with Oracle and eliminating the need for reconciliation (working with the Path Center)

Staffing

We recognized that challenges with the new financial systems, the growth of our research enterprise as well as changes in the labor market related to the pandemic have significantly impacted our talent pool.

Our overall research administrator staffing levels have improved from 274 on July 1 to 305 on December 1, but we still have 58 positions in various stages of the recruitment across the campus including Health Sciences. We are actively recruiting a central pool of career employees to support departments with staffing shortages. So far, 7 fund managers hired into the pool have gone through a new training boot camp developed by our partners in Research Affairs with 8 more participating in December.

Support model

A major point of feedback has been the difficulty of navigating the various networks supporting our enterprise system renewal.

The first level of support will continue to be provided by each Academic VC Office, leveraging their strong connections with the various departments. We are grateful for the work of the Health Sciences SWAT team and of the Academic Affairs and SIO Tiger team.

We will simplify our central support model by setting up a Finance Help Desk reachable both online and by phone later this month (specific announcement to come).

Listening to the campus

We are listening to the campus, through a combination of meetings, local town halls and a comprehensive listening tour across Academic Affairs divisions. We are grateful for the feedback and we are following up through issue-driven meetings focused on developing solutions together.

We are also collecting feedback through periodic surveys with DBOs and MSOs. We will be expanding the survey to a broader audience, which includes research administrators and PIs by January 2022. In the meantime, please do not hesitate to reach out to any of us, or if you are more comfortable, to Allorah Pradenas at OSI. We are here for you.

Once again, we are hugely appreciative of everyone’s hard work. We will continue to keep you updated on the work taking place in response to the feedback.

Pierre Ouillet
Vice Chancellor and Chief Financial Officer

Vince Kellen
Chief Information Officer

Cheryl A. Ross
Controller / AVC Business & Financial Services / VCHS Financial Officer

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