Present: Landen Bain, Pakis Bessias, John Board, Jim Dronsfield, Annette Foster, Nevin Fouts, Mike Gower, Paul Harrod, Matthew Kotler, Betty Le Compagnon, Jonathan Luebbers, Melissa Mills, Caroline Nisbet, Michael Pickett, Rafael Rodriguez, Leslie Saper, John Sigmon, Robert Wolpert
Guests: Dan Clement, Mike Woodard, Ed Sharp, Lisa Hall, John Solms
Review of Minutes and Announcements
Corrections to minutes approved.
Betty Le Compagnon handed out copies of the OIT Annual Report.
Announcements: Charlie Register is doing much better - additional surgery tomorrow in step down room. Duke selected by CAUSE to be profiled in spring publication. Will be contacting people to be interviewed.
The Steering Committee met and blessed these decisions: Unix cluster go ahead, PC 300Mhz processors instead of 200, will proceed with multi-media cluster in Old Chem., will hold aside some money to see if Mac upgrade demand is still there - possibly buy instead of upgrade.
Procurement Presentation: Dan Clement, Mike Woodard, Ed Sharp, Lisa Hall.
Demo of Procurement system. Mike Pickett discussed how Duke has had to come to own the procurement system process instead of the consultants. Duke has also had to change their business practices. Dr. Trask set a small limit for modifications and so far the team has made three. The online requisitioning on the desktop will not be until fall. Prior to that will be pilot departments and early rollout departments this summer. SAP is in production with DCRI on the project accounting system with 1 to 2 users.
Ed Sharp: An executive support memo from Dr. Trask and Bill Donelan was sent out describing the major change taking place in procurement. Ed asked on behalf of Procurement Services and the implementation team for support from ITAC on the changes this project creates. The forms that a department will fill in for rollout were passed out for review. Procurement Services back office will go live in April.
Dan Clement: Dan explained they would show requisition entry, how a requisition is turned into a Purchase Order (PO), invoice entry and what information can be seen about a purchase online. . He explained that the material master has been loaded with the materials bought most often from current suppliers. The demo was on the Development system and showed all possible options in the system. Dan explained that departmental end-users' screens will be configured to show only functions they can do.
Entering a Purchase Requisition: Dan requested that the system find a supplier (determine a source), and entered the delivery date, the requester, the purchasing group (often called p group - analogous to a department or an approval entity). The material was searched for by description using key words. The default object code for that material was brought in by the system and the user may override it. The users default fund code was brought in by the system and it may also be overridden. Each line of a requisition can be assigned to multiple fund codes if desired. The unloading point and goods recipient were entered. The system found the supplier Duke has a contract with for the selected material. There were many lengthy text fields for extra information on the material, PO, shipping instructions, single source justification, etc. These fields can be used for departmental information if desired. . The Purchase Requisition was saved in the system. Dan explained that an automated process would run to convert purchase requisitions to purchase orders if all the approvals are done. The requester can view online the purchase requisition and that the purchase order was created. Inquiries on purchases can be by cost center (fund code), all your purchase requisitions, etc. The lists displayed the status of each purchase.
Question: Can you browse for materials? Yes, on identical items it will bring up all materials found including vendor and price.
Question: Can you see more information on multiple materials. Not available in SAP now. More information will be in the catalog. The catalog is not ready to be demonstrated yet. The catalog will be ready for use in late summer.
Question: How do you monitor orders that have been put in but haven't shown up yet? Showed online lookup of status, including fax status.
Lisa Hall: Explained she would pay the invoice against the PO just entered. Keyed in entry date, invoice number, purchase number, and amount. The system brought up the PO and showed the match of money to the invoice. If the entry person sees that this is a match, he hits OK and the payment document is created.
Question: Where is receiving? Did not turn on that option globally. Departments can choose to receive. However, if you choose to receive, you must receive. Or else the invoice will be blocked from payment.
Lisa showed the purchase requisition, PO, and the posted invoice online.
Question: Will we still get financial statements? Yes. Question: In SAP can I see open orders and ones that should be on the financial statements? Yes. Information is posted every night to CUFS.
Dan demonstrated some reporting capabilities: Showed what had been bought from a vendor that month. By double clicking on a line you are able to drill down to the original documents.
Question: I notice the names on the screens are SAP specific. Can this be changed to Duke terminology. Not without modifying code and we were told not to do so.
Question: How sophisticated is the search feature? Can use wild cards. Cannot do Boolean expressions.
Question: What is the schedule for rollout? The team is working with the Hospital, Medical Center, Provost, and Administration to get a ranked list of departments for rollout.
Question: Who can they contact to ask to get a position on the list? Hospital-Jim Jones, Academic-Jim Roberts, Medical Center-Mike Gower, Administration-Mike Pickett.
Question: Will ITAC do a critical walk through later? Michael Pickett answered yes.
Enterprise Update
Mike Gower: In November of last year we presented to ITAC the SAP planning process. The purpose was to address the strategic needs of the Duke University Health System (DUHS). The implementation of an enterprise-wide administrative system was approved at their Trustee meeting in January. There will be a single human resources and Payroll system for the institution. The other projects approved are to install the systems for DUHS only.
The implementation will focus on business accounting instead of college accounting. It will be a vanilla implementation of SAP. This implies and we want to streamline processes. In this project we must consider using SAP for rest of university to manage grants, contracts, etc., but not commit that they must remain the same. While we will plan for this, this is not part of the scope of this immediate project. In the future other modules can be used such as the project system and plant maintenance. In these systems we cannot build in the Duke-only way of doing business because DUHS may acquire partners or other entities. Our plan is holding to all these principles.
The report due to Dr. Trask and Bill Donelan in January was completed and given to them in December. This project is of extreme importance to DUHS. There is no way DUHS could take on other partners with our 25 year old systems, with year 2000 problems, and oriented to the university. Our current systems are not real time and not organized for management centers. A key goal is to manage costs, of which 65% is personnel.
The solution was SAP. It was already here and we had to prove it would not work. We can leverage technical experience from the procurement project. Now we know how to bring up and run Sap, which is a huge advantage. SAP came to us with great interest which was pure business for them. Duke is a "two-for-one"-a hospital and a university. SAP is eager to work with us. We are partnering with SAP and KPMG Peat Marwick on this project. There is only one contract with SAP. When we looked at the alternatives, such as PeopleSoft, Lawson, there were many reasons to not choose them. They were not as interested in Duke at the time. In "absolutely un-Duke-like speed" we took the plan to DUHS Board of Trustees in January in order to be able to install payroll to avoid our year 2000 problems. We need a go live date of 1/1/99 hopefully.
Michael Pickett: SAP is not known for its speed of implementation, although SAP has ASAP (an Accelerated SAP implementation methodology) now. What takes time is how to put processes in place when we are changing how things have been done for 30 years. How much change can we do that gives the needed deadline and is worth the money spent? How will we make this work well with PeopleSoft for integration with SAP? Maybe we will use a PeopleSoft database in the middle. The technical integration group is working on this, single sign on, and other technical issues. We decided with Landen to have one SAP shop, not one for the university and one for the Medical center - and one help desk. There is a lot of work there to partner. As of Monday we have a complete team from Duke and SAP and KPMG. More than have space! We are moving procurement to Broad Street Procurement Services office for go live. HR/PR is moving into Kangaroo. The rest will be at Independence Park near Durham Regional. The Financial team will be working on the chart of accounts and reporting. Asset Management and the Project System teams are working together. For Materials Management we will assume that what we have already done will work well. The next phase is focussed on special hospital purchasing not done in Phase 0. Interfaces are estimated at 300 at first blush. We will keep CUFS up, but it will no longer be the GL of record after 7/1/98. All feeder systems will go into SAP, then feed CUFS, and get our regular reports. Having Mike Gower as chair of the Steering Committee advantageous because he is on university side, so he will remember to continue the process on the university side after this first phase.
We are conducting workshops that ask the question--How will we cram what we do today in SAP? Out of this we will craft a plan that includes scope and how it will change the way Duke does business. For example: will Duke continue to do paper checks or will we require employees to have bank accounts? We may or may not decide to do this. After such decisions, then we configure the system. The Functional Advisory Committees will brought in as experts to look over our shoulders. We will also convene user groups to work with us in configuration time, and then implementation teams. The implementation teams will be the people who will have to make work it work. We will be going live on Release 4.0 of SAP. This is good for Human Resources because it has more functionality in 4.0. We also were reluctant to train folks on 3.1 and then change to the next release soon after.
Question: Have you found any corporate examples of implementations of GL and HR/PR in this time period? Michael Pickett - Methodist Memphis did in a much shorter period and had problems. We visited to learn their problems. They centered around designing new processes. This is hard. Mike Gower: SAP can do anything, so what do you want to do? This is a struggle for Human Resources. For this reason Payroll will be implemented first and Human Resources will be 6-10 months later.
Question: With all care taken and good people managed I have few concerns technically. My concern is end users. Can we reverse order and go out to end users earlier? Mike Pickett: We need to begin communicating to the end users earlier. We haven't yet hired change management person to begin that effort.
Question: Could you outline to the campus side who will see what soon? Mike Pickett: For procurement Phase 0 business managers will be the first to be trained - then their assistants; then any persons who requisition. Those who are buying electronically will have to be trained on Rel. 4.0 next January.
Robert Wolpert: One of the goals was to disperse participation. I am a little discouraged at how much one has to know to fill in forms. Mike Gower: Remember the catalog will make it easier. We need to extend that idea of ease to other systems - kiosks, etc.
Question: Is SPS going away? No - will complement SAP.
Question: Confluence of all these systems. We are using Paris now. It is easier than SAP, but we are learning skills that will transfer to SAP
Mike Gower: When we come back to the university it will be harder to redesign processes. The Hospital can be done easier.
Robert Wolpert: If you have future meeting topics, please email them to me. The network is one future topic.