Performance Based Management

Self-Assessment Report

October 2004

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Business Data Processing

Introduction/Background

Date of last assessment: October 2003

Departmental Overview

Laboratory Mission

The Stanford Linear Accelerator Center is the lead Department of Energy (DOE) laboratory for electron-based high energy physics. It is dedicated to research in elementary particle physics, accelerator physics and in allied fields that can make use of its synchrotron radiation facilities—including biology, chemistry, geology, materials science and environmental engineering. Operated on behalf of the DOE by Stanford University, SLAC is a national user facility serving universities, industry and other research institutions throughout the world. Its mission can be summarized as follows:

	Perform world-class research in high energy physics, particle astrophysics and cosmology, and in the use of synchrotron radiation
	Provide accelerators, detectors, instrumentation and support for national and international research programs in elementary particle physics and allied fields that use synchrotron radiation
	Advance the art of accelerators and related devices through development of sources of high energy particles and synchrotron radiation, plus new techniques for their scientific utilization
	Advance the critical technologies necessary to maintain its leadership and excellence in particle physics, accelerator physics, particle astrophysics and cosmology, and synchrotron radiation
	Transfer practical knowledge and innovative technology to the private sector
	Contribute to the education of the next generation of scientists and engineers, and to the scientific awareness of the public
	Achieve and maintain excellence in matters of environmental concern and provide for the safety and health of its staff and the general public.

1. To provide outstanding service to our customers that is timely, efficient, accurate, and courteous.  Measured by customer survey and customer comments and interviews.
2. To lead and participate in the successful ongoing maintenance of SLAC’s Business Information System (integrated business software is by PeopleSoftâ).  Measured by adherence to schedule and successful planned upgrades and enhancements.

Accomplishments/Project Goal Status for FY 2004:

BIS/”Gateway”/Financial Data Warehouse –

• We are pleased to report that the Financial Data Warehouse moved forward successfully in FY 2004 to present the proof-of-concept model as promised.  We were able to demonstrate that when a user queries the warehouse, the needed information is already there, with inconsistencies and differences already resolved. Queries are much easier and more efficient -- data that originally came from different sources are now more accurate and are available in one place.
  Status: Results were successful and very encouraging.  Our extensive efforts in this area for the past fiscal year were to get the Proof-of-concept completed and demonstrated to key management and technical users of the system.  Feedback from these successful demonstrations has allowed us to move to the next level to bring the data warehouse forward to become a functional tool in FY 2005.  Rating: “Excellent”.

• Continue to enhance our on-line delivery of information to the SLAC community through both the BIS and “Gateway to SLAC Resources”.

Status: Successful and ongoing.  User statistics (shown below) demonstrate that we continue to increase the use of these resources.  Details on these successful efforts are covered below.  Rating: “Excellent”

Ongoing Monitoring of Business Information System (BIS) Usage

Data are automatically collected to determine trends in BIS usage.  Through this automated data gathering, we are able to better understand the growth in use and contact our users for information on how we can better serve their needs.  We continue to see an upward trend (11.6% increase) in use of the BIS website.  This upward trend in usage is a direct reflection of how much users are coming to depend on this feature to obtain critical business information and conduct day-to-day operations such as on-line transactions in travel, property management, and purchasing.

With these data, we have a more complete picture of how well the BIS is serving the SLAC community.

The “Gateway to SLAC Resources”

We are pleased to announce that the usage of this resource increased significantly during FY 2003.  Total usage increased 248% to an average of 8,5595 visits to the site per month.

The “SLAC Today” web page has helped immensely in making this resource more accessible.  We continue to work closely with the staff responsible for “SLAC Today” to ensure the combination of their information is complimentary to the “Gateway” information, but not duplicative.  We feel it is important to make easily understandable and readily-available resources accessible to the SLAC community through these sites.

Discussion:

Overall user traffic at the BIS web site is averaging 173,711 requests per month.  This is an 11.6% increase in customer usage since the FY 2003 reporting period.  Feedback from users indicates that the system is being used regularly and is commonly accepted as a rapid means of obtaining the information they need.

Use of the “Gateway to SLAC Resources” continues to grow as members of the SLAC community discover what an excellent place this is for information on a variety of topics.

Delivery of accurate, on-line cost information as early in the month as possible --

Throughout FY2004, accurate financial data was available to users by the 4^th working day (sometimes sooner) of each month.  We continue to do daily validation of the financial data throughout the month and this ensures that we meet this goal.  This is a proven system – it is timely, reliable, and accurate. 

Business Application Support (BAS) –

• Implement the PeopleSoft Training Administration Interface to Full Functionality

(for use with the new site-wide Training system). This project is progressing but is running into competition for resources that are required to perform maintenance on production software.  The PeopleSoft portion of this project is closely tied to the custom design being performed by another group which has its own resource shortages. 

• Implement the new BIS Firewall

Well underway.  It is very nearly ready to turn over to BAS staff for testing.  Servers are complete and firewall protocols are written.  Final issues with integrating UNIX support are being discussed.

• Begin the Financials upgrade to Release 8

Accomplish implementation of new infrastructure and deliver a working "demonstration" database to users.  Identify which customizations to keep and which to discard and begin the re-apply of the ones to keep.
This has been done. In spite of not having the new firewall, we have set up the demo database and the Release 8 Financial database behind our old firewall using the Release 8 PeopleSoft architecture so that developers could begin the upgrade.  The developers accomplished the fit/gap and have now begun the customization that will be re-applied.  Users and developers have attended new training.

• Synchronize SLAC Institutional database and PeopleSoft Human Resources database.

Excellent progress was made this year.  Data ownership and control was defined and agreed to.  Key data elements, such as department names and others, were agreed and synchronized.  The person-data is about 60% synchronized.

• Implement Request for Proposal (RFP) functionality in PeopleSoft Purchasing application.  Done -- on schedule and has met all requirements.  It is used and well-liked by the buyers utilizing it.
   

• Finalize all BIS projects and continue with enhancements and changes as customer needs are expressed.  Done, as required.

 Other Notable Accomplishments during FY 2004

The BIS/BAS group provided leadership, resources, and guidance to several areas this past fiscal year.  Below is only a partial listing of the “Outstanding” accomplishments in this area:

 Purchasing:

• Implemented new coding to capture whether or a not a purchase is Energy Star rated, made from recycled material, or made from hazardous materials.
• Enhanced Chemical Reports so that they can be run by the user.
• Completed and implemented RFP/RFQ process in PeopleSoft.
• Completed and implemented Stores Blanket Order Release system.
• Created workflow eMail to tell a Blanket Order owner when their blanket order is about to expire.
• Added code to automatically update a Stores item with the price from the last purchase.
• Did most of a new system to create and track Stores Blanket Order Release in PeopleSoft so that all PeopleSoft functions can be used, such as Receiving and automatic “putaway” into Stores inventory.  User knows when a backordered item has already been ordered, etc.
• Interfaced PeopleSoft to Bank One Credit Card system (PROCARD).  Taking details from their system, editing them, and generating General Ledger journals.

Human Resources:

• Implemented citizenship data in PeopleSoft HR in preparation of federal requirements to track all non-citizens.  Part of the SEVIS program.
• Implementing, with Stanford campus IT staff, (to 90% completion) a system at SLAC to interface with campus’s Registry system to post and harvest PeopleSoft HR events.
• Added code to accommodate the new Stanford Vision plan.
• Added code to handle the July week off without pay.
• Simplified processing of Contractors in the HR system by splitting them out from regular SLAC employees.

Financial Management:

• Added enhancements to indirect allocations, which had to be modified extensively to meet SLAC’s highly specialized requirements. 
• The Allocation System was further enhanced to isolate the labor forecast for DoE from internal reports.  This project was crucial to meeting our DoE reporting deadline.
• SLAC changed our bank to Union Bank, necessitating changes to SLAC’s Financials system.
• Converted PO Categories to be the same as GL Account numbers.
• Created a system for automatically loading the DoE contract modifications into PeopleSoft, and had to overcome the obstacles often associated with using external data sources.  It required a complete rewrite of the program to load the DoE Trial Balance, after DoE changed the format of their data.

General IT Enhancements:

• Upgraded to MetaFrame XPe Feature Release 3 and Service Pack 3. Part of the EPNPORTAL2 project.
• Implemented Windows 2000/MetaFrame XPe server and ICA application platform from Windows NT4/MetaFrame 1.8 in development environments.
• Implemented PeopleTools 7.63 in development environments, upgraded from Financials 7.52.
• Implemented hardware raid controllers on MetaFrame XPe application servers.
• Enhanced the email notification program that monitors Process Scheduler jobs.  This program has greatly improved the reliability of our PeopleSoft system, because it warns programmers and functional users when jobs stop working.
• Enhanced the XLLOAD program, which loads any Excel worksheet into an Oracle table.

Overall Performance

Customer satisfaction:

We are pleased to report that overall customer satisfaction continues to be high based on feedback we receive from our customers and from continuing reduction of “trouble calls” received.  Customer comments are very important to us, and we act upon them quickly. Rating: “Outstanding”.

Cost/Efficiency:

The BAS/BIS project continues to be conducted with SLAC staff, selecting people with skills and knowledge appropriate for their role and distributing the workload to allow people to concentrate on their areas of specialty.  In some cases, we bring in outside consulting, but this is the exception.  The advantage of having well-trained in-house staff means we continue to be less dependent on outside consultants as we improve our services.   Rating: “Excellent”.

Documentation

Documentation is available on request

Problem Analysis

Root-Cause Analysis

Our expertise in using the PeopleSoft® system and in understanding the complexities of delivering data to our customers has increased to the point of excellence that stands as a model for other laboratories.  We have anecdotal information of other organizations who have not achieved the level of success we have with our systems.  Our staff’s dedication has enhanced our productivity and ability to continue to deliver an excellent, and easy-to-access Business Information System to the SLAC community.

Barrier(s) to Improvement

The firewall, itself, is a barrier, because it is makes system-to-system interfaces very difficult, but also because it is not very flexible.  Since we have a project to replace it, this barrier will be reduced soon.  Another obstacle is the fact that BAS is dependent on the Windows Infrastructure Team in SCS to provide PeopleSoft’s underlying infrastructure, such as, firewall, backup, Citrix, Active Directory, etc.  We will be working on the limiting aspects of this new technical dependency over the coming year.   Our goal is to serve the business information needs of the laboratory community and a cohesive and smooth running infrastructure is essential.  This past year, we have seen the need for better coordination to meet our goals.

Improvement Action Plan/Goals

Recognized areas of improvement

• Replace existing BSD firewall
• Use PeopleSoft for more BSD and HR functions which are needed SLAC-wide
• Allow HR self-service thru PeopleSoft
• Eliminate double entry of BSD and HR data wherever it occurs.
• Move PeopleSoft to be web-based rather than windows screens (accomplished by implementing PS rel 8)
• Have a consistence interface system to vendors who accept online web orders.
• Replace Front and Center code with supported programming language, such as as PeopleSoft or Oracle SQL.
• Replace programmer-maintained server with centrally supported server.
• Carry department spending plans in PeopleSoft (Budgets)
• Be able to easily reconcile Inventory to Accounts Payable
• Synchronize person-data in SLAC’s several separate databases and with campus.
• Maintain a reliable schedule in the Financial PeopleSoft upgrade to PeopleSoft Release 8.

Goals for FY2005

• Complete the next (operational) phase of the Financial Data Warehouse.  This will enable selected managers and groups to use this decision-support system for obtaining the needed financial information
• Implement the PeopleSoft Training Administration Phase 1 (for use with the new site-wide Training system).
• Begin using the new BSD firewall being implemented by the Windows infrastructure team in both HR and Financials.
• Complete the Financials upgrade to Release 8.8, including new products (examples, Enterprise Portal, eProcurement, Strategic Sourcing)
• Complete implementation of the PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal
• Convert PeopleSoft HR to use new firewall architecture.
• Implement HR eRecruit
• Synchronize SLAC Institutional database and PeopleSoft Human Resources database.
• Interface to new Chemical Management System to accept Invoice data into PeopleSoft with required approvals.
• Complete the new BOR form and database (January 2005).  This will allow for a much more streamlined process, provide more internal control, enhance ease of use, and tracks BOR entries for future reference.
• Complete training database registration and payment forms (January 2005).  This will allow for one form for all internal and external training requests, it will provide more internal control, will be a better tracking system of training for the user and the user's supervisor, will streamline the approval process, and will provide more administrative and reporting capabilities for HR, ESH, SCS, and others
• Complete the domestic travel authorization and payment form (February 2005).  This streamlined process will result in more internal control, easier-to-use and track trip information, and provides more administrative capabilities and reporting for the travel reimbursement office
• Launch the new online Phone Directory.  This will provide more internal information (mobile phone, user's institution). It will also give users the ability to provide alternative directory information via a self-serve form, thereby streamlining directory change submissions.

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