University of Washington

UW BUSINESS FOR THE 21ST CENTURY A Great Leap Forward Bringing the UW's human resources and payroll operations into the 21st century School of Social Work Director of Finance & Administration Vicki AndersonEllis looks forward to the benefits of a modern HR/Payroll system. W hen the UW's online payroll system launched more than 30 years ago, it was cutting-edge and the Bee Gees' "Stayin' Alive" dominated the charts, said Vicki Anderson-Ellis, Director of Finance & Administration for the School of Social Work. Now, three decades later, the UW is operating on a payroll system that lacks basic human resources functionality and cannot support the increasingly complex business needs of a growing university. "It creates challenges every single month," Anderson-Ellis said. "Today the UW is a $4.6 billion global enterprise. We're the third largest employer in the state. It's the 21st century, but we're still doing redundant manual entry. We're constantly forced to invent end-runs to get information we need to pay people and support their careers. It requires a lot of time, and there's a lot of frustration. While our peers have moved toward automation and self-service, we still struggle with basics." But relief is in sight. In September, the UW released a Request for Proposal, undertaking a major effort to implement a modern, highly automated HR/Payroll system that can chart every employee's career, provide information needed to manage the UW's business operations, and keep up with a rapidly changing regulatory landscape. "A modern HR/Payroll system will give us an entirely new level of support for our operations," said Lisa Yeager, Director of UW-IT's Human Resources/Payroll Program. "It's going to improve services and create efficiencies and productivity gains throughout the UW. We'll have the flexibility to quickly respond to changes in our regulatory environment. And it's going to give us the tools we 4 UW INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY need to attract, support, and effectively manage our world-class faculty and staff." This project is part of a larger effort by the University to modernize the core administrative systems that run its critical business operations, according to V'Ella Warren, UW Senior Vice President and lead Executive Sponsor of the HR/Payroll Replacement Project. While the University can tackle only one project of this scale and complexity at a time, incremental improvements are also underway for the UW's student and financial systems. "We see this as the beginning of a complete renewal of all our core business systems and processes," Warren said. "Without modern systems, the University will be at a competitive disadvantage with other institutions. Our faculty and staff have to work harder, process more transactions, and operate without complete data." In preparation for a new system, the UW is engaging HR and payroll staff and leadership across its three campuses in a Business Process Redesign effort to identify opportunities to streamline and standardize current business processes so they will function optimally in the future. "We're laying the groundwork for success," said Yeager. "We've interviewed peer institutions who've done similar projects to find out what they've learned. And we're undertaking a change management effort to make sure we're providing the right information and training at the right times in the process. We're determined to do it right." "These systems touch everyone who's part of the UW," AndersonEllis said." We're all excited to move forward and find a great system that can grow with us over the long term."

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