The second wave of faculty and staff engagement for feedback on U-M’s Shared Services Center was concluded in November, and project leaders have set April 20 as the key date for the implementation of new services.
The SSC, which opened in August 2014, has been handling the university’s accounts payable and accounts receivable functions as well as certain Human Resources transactions.
The April implementation will add to the SSC more staff members from campus who will begin offering added services including statement of activity and gross pay reconciliation, time and leave administration, processing of I-9 forms for employment, and travel and expense report processing.
Staff will begin training and moving to the SSC gradually, and new services will be offered starting on April 20.
“In the fall, we repeated the engagement process to review the next set of processes planned for the SSC in April,” said Senior Project Director Thom Madden. “Like the earlier phase, we asked faculty and staff to review each process and gathered feedback to help ensure that creating more efficient processes in one area didn’t create additional burdens in another.”
Madden said the team has heard concerns throughout the project about the importance of travel and expense processing to faculty productivity, so the project conducted a pilot with academic and administrative units in December. The pilot was successful and resulted in a plan to implement travel and expense services on a rolling basis by school and college that will extend somewhat beyond April.
Delegate services will be offered by the SSC so that faculty and staff can choose to use an SSC delegate to process expenses, a delegate in their unit, if available, or complete travel and expense transactions (which includes PCard transactions) on a self-service basis.
Faculty feedback also raised productivity concerns caused by administrative systems and procedures, often including the usability of Concur and the need to re-evaluate the $5,000 bid threshold before requiring competitive bids for purchases.
Based on this input, Procurement Services now is in the midst of a pilot program with faculty and staff who are evaluating the Concur mobile application’s potential for universitywide use.
Additionally, the bid threshold was evaluated, and the university received approval from the Board of Regents to raise the limit to $10,000 (single-transaction limit for P-Card purchases remains $5,000). That change became effective on Jan. 1 along with additional updates to the SPG.
