Finance and Accounting Employees Share Prestigious State-wide Award
March 20, 2006
Four Finance and Accounting employees will share a 2006 Davis Productivity Award for their work on streamlining UCF’s process for establishing departments and projects. The annual Davis Productivity Awards provide state-wide recognition to state employees and work units for making measurable improvements in the way they perform their duties and serve Florida citizens. Reggie Besana, Varsha Das, Randy Foster, and Becky Vilsack partnered with employees at UCF’s Institute of Simulation and Training (IST) to automate a previously cumbersome, manual process. The new automated application provides functionality for requesting and processing requests for creating or updating departments and projects in the university’s financials system. The application also provides functionality for assigning or changing budget data on departments or projects. Requests are received either online in UCF Financials or via messaging from ARGIS, the system developed the Office of Research and Commercialization (ORC) and widely used by Principal Investigators to manage their projects and grants. Based on the number of the requests processed in the first two months after the project was implemented, annualized cost savings to the university are expected to reach more than $230,000. That figure does not include other intangible savings like the convenience of tracking set-up requests online and e-mail notification to requesters when the process is complete, so the true cost savings for UCF will be significantly greater than the early estimate. Since chartfields are the building blocks of any financial transaction within Financials, Student Administration (SA) and Human Resources (HR) systems, the business process improvement impact for the university is significant. In addition, the status of the request can be tracked online in both systems and monitored easily.
 Sharing in the Davis Productivity award were Tammie McClellan, and Eric Johnson of IST. Functionality included in ARGIS includes automated messaging of requests triggered by change requests on projects within ARGIS and instantaneous notification to the ARGIS requestor when the department or project is setup. The six UCF employees will share a $500 award in the Notable category for implementing the streamlined process for establishing departments and projects at UCF. In a congratulatory e-mail, University Controller Linda Bonta expressed her appreciation for “all the teamwork, cooperation, design, testing and implementation” that was required for the successful completion of this project.
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