July 23, 2008
General Project Information:
Sierra College is underway with the implementation of Banner Administrative Software. This district wide project will effectively replace our existing administrative system software and will provide quality and accountability as Sierra College moves forward with this integrated system to improve service to students, staff, faculty, administrators and alumni. The Banner integrated system includes the modules mentioned below as well as other auxiliary systems.
- Finance - Purchasing go live on June 1st 2008. The remainder of Finance go live on July 1st 2008. Finance module is live!!
- HR/Payroll - scheduled to go live on Jan 1st, 2009.
- Student and Instruction – scheduled to go live in 2009.
- Fin Aid – scheduled to go live in 2009.
- Portal (Luminis) – tentatively scheduled to go live in Jan, 2009.
Your patience and support of the departments mentioned above is requested, as Sierra College undertakes this mission critical implementation. The Project Charter provides a lot of information regarding this district wide project. For the Project Charter and more information please see: www.sierracollege.edu/banner. For more detailed information on progress by functional module see the implementation team’s status below.
Implementation Team Status:
Finance –
The Finance Module is up and running!!! Big thanks to the General Ledger and IIT team members for all of their continuing hard work and a job well done!!! Accounts Payable has completed the first student refund check run and the first regular bill warrant run. Thanks to everyone that submitted items and worked with us to get them successfully through the approval queues and out the door as pre-folded secure sealed checks. The Business Office staff members on the BFIT team will now work on closing the fiscal year in QSS and updating the new fiscal year. As always, we welcome your questions and concerns.
HR/Payroll –
Our HR/Payroll monthly 3-day training sessions are about to ramp up. Beginning in August we’ll have two sessions, three in September and then meeting weekly beginning in October and possibly through January. The Team continues to build the HR/Payroll module in order to begin the very important task of testing our system for our “Go Live” date in January. We want your paycheck to be correct! Of course this means that certain HR/Payroll Team members will be in training and workgroup sessions and away from their desks. Thank you for your continued patience and understanding in responding to your inquiries.
Student and Instruction –
The Student/Instruction team continued to test and build rules in Banner. We have also been working on understanding and cleaning up what Self-Service-Banner will provide to faculty, staff, and students. Ongoing work sessions have been scheduled for the AA’s to help with the Summer 2009 schedule development. A special thank you goes to Jim Langley and Patti Pawlik who worked on the synchronization process for student data. It was run successfully in Production on July 21st and will continue to be run frequently as we have begun working in two worlds – Banner and Legacy.
Financial Aid –
The financial aid team continues to build tables for testing in preparation of our go-live in Jan 09. We just completed our initial process for setup to various validation and rules forms to build the Student Loan Module and we will continue to test our process and progress with loading student aid reports, generating requirements, and building communications. This may not sound like much but we spend hours building and testing our process every step of the way!
Financial Aid is working towards a soft rollout for new and continuing students to enter through the Portal to view their financial aid information. With that comes a great deal of content review before the Jan 09 target date.
Portal (Luminis) –
Alice Kim, our consultant, was here this month and met with the Luminis implementation team members to review and check on their progress. Go live dates for HR/Payroll, Finance, and Student/Instruction are still being discussed, as well as how to market the Luminis portal. Implementation teams are working on the huge task of deciding the content of their individual areas that will need to be in the Luminis portal. Alice will be back again in August to meet with the teams to discuss content and go live dates for each area. So stay tuned…
The Banner Bulletin will be sent on a monthly basis.
Scott Snyder, Systems and Programming Mgr., ext 2410