[Physstaff] FW: Financial Management System progress update

[Erling Riis]

FYI
Erling

===============================================================
Professor Erling Riis
Head of Department
Department of Physics,               tel: 0141-5483490
Strathclyde University,
John Anderson Building,             e-mail: e.riis at strath.ac.uk<mailto:e.riis at strath.ac.uk>
Glasgow, G4 0NG
UK


The Department is a partner in SUPA, the Scottish Universities Physics Alliance
The University of Strathclyde is a charitable body, registered in Scotland, number SC015263


From: acaheads-bounces at lists.strath.ac.uk [mailto:acaheads-bounces at lists.strath.ac.uk] On Behalf Of Hugh Darby
Sent: 09 December 2015 12:50
To: 'deans at lists.strath.ac.uk'; 'directors at lists.strath.ac.uk'; 'acaheads at lists.strath.ac.uk'; 'admheads at strath.ac.uk'
Subject: [acaheads] Financial Management System progress update

Dear Colleagues

The Financial Management System (FMS) has now been live for 14 weeks following implementation on 12 August. The project represents the single-biggest process and software change the University has undertaken in many years.

This email provides an update on progress to date. Please share this information with colleagues who may be using the system.

Overview
FMS is a complex application, supporting a huge change in ways of working across the University.  By replacing our manual and paper-intensive processes with online processing, a greater number of users than ever have been brought into direct contact with financial processes.
Significantly, after many years of supporting our finance systems in-house, we are now using a third party for the supply and support of a proprietary system.
The new FMS is based on Agresso, which is the pre-eminent system in the UK, used by more than 40% of the country’s higher education institutions.

Operational processing following go-live
As colleagues may have experienced, this initial period of using FMS has presented some significant transaction processing challenges, particularly in the areas of supplier invoicing.
Transaction volumes received into FMS in the weeks after go-live were much lower than normal, but rose significantly thereafter. This peak in workload was exacerbated by the unexpectedly high volume of transactions initiated pre-FMS but having to be concluded on FMS – transactions which are more time-consuming and complex to process.
These factors, in addition to a number of functional and configuration issues, resulted in a period of unsatisfactory transaction processing times. Throughout this period, the project team has been working with the software suppliers to resolve the issues, while the Payments team has been working intensely to sustain operational activity, supported by colleagues from other areas of Finance. Support and cooperation from departments and the wider University community has been very important during this period.
Our first priority has been to get all payments processed as quickly as possible, while endeavouring to respond to the large volume of inquiries we have received since the implementation of the system.
We have emailed all FMS-enabled suppliers to apologise for any delays they may have experienced, and have reminded them of our new processes, to assist in ensuring invoices are paid promptly.

The situation today
The operational position is improving and new invoices are generally being captured on FMS within 1‑2 days of receipt. Suppliers and customers are becoming more familiar with the system and the backlog has been significantly reduced. Our focus now is on resolving outstanding inquiries and responding more quickly to new ones.
We are working hard to move towards ‘business as usual’ processing, which is expected to be achieved by the end of this month.
Notwithstanding the frustrations and delays arising from the operational challenges, the University has continued to pay suppliers throughout the period. In the first three months of FMS, more than 15,000 invoices have been paid to 1,250 different suppliers, reflecting some £23m of purchases.
I will write to you again next week to outline the steps we are taking to provide ongoing support for the continued embedding and enhancement of FMS as we move out of the project phase and into business as usual use of FMS.

Kind regards,

Hugh Darby
Financial Controller

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://phys.strath.ac.uk/pipermail/physstaff/attachments/20151209/5a8d766b/attachment.html 
-------------- next part --------------
An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed...
Name: ATT00001.txt
Url: http://phys.strath.ac.uk/pipermail/physstaff/attachments/20151209/5a8d766b/attachment.txt