Report to the Lane Community College Board
LASR Project
September, 2002

The project is on schedule and within budget.  The Finance System is on-line.

FINANCE
Finance has been live for 10 weeks. The system is functioning well and the staff is becoming more accustomed to accessing financial information on-line and to completing purchase orders by entering them directly into the administrative system. Managers and executive staff can approve purchase orders electronically as well. Recently, members of the Finance Team met with Peer-to-Peer, an informal group of administrative assistants at the college. The purpose of the meeting was to provide an opportunity for the administrative staff to ask questions about the new system and provide information to them about advancements we foresee in the immediate future. That meeting went very well; employees are not having difficulties using the Banner Finance system.  The Finance Team also had a joint consultation with Human Resources about position budgeting the week of August 13, and began budgeting training that week as well. In late August and early September, the Finance Team is busy with closing out the final COCO financial year and with the college's annual audit.

In addition to purchase orders, the college is now paying vendor invoices with checks generated in Banner. Staff reimbursement checks are also printing in Banner, while Financial Aid checks will continue to be generated by the COCO system until July 1, 2003.

HUMAN RESOURCES
The Human Resources (HR) Team continues to test the Banner payroll system and receive training on web for employee, the electronic self-service tool that Lane refers to as ìExpressLaneî.  Discussions are ongoing with labor groups on contract language modifications necessary to fully implement Banner HR.  Work is on schedule for the parallel testing that will take place October through December with "go live" scheduled for January 2003.  Lane employees will begin receiving training on the Banner HR system in September 2002.

STUDENT
The Student Core Team entered over 200 courses into the Banner test database in August and has learned how to build sections from the virtual catalog.  We continue to work closely with colleagues from the various Extended Learning areas as we develop this new software in a one-registrar environment.  The Student Core team announced a change to our current Annual Registration process at the September 6th LASR Forum meeting.  The name of this registration process is changing to Advance Registration, beginning spring 2003, and for the first year of the Banner implementation, 2003-2004, students will not register for three terms out, but will have priority registration access on a term-by-term basis. This will provide the extra time that academic departments will need to build the schedule each term.  After the first year, the basic schedule information can ìrollî from one term to the next. The student system will be "live" for the 2003-2004 academic year.

FINANCIAL AID

The Financial Aid Team completed their third week of training on August 29.  The session covered population selection and letter generation.   The team has decided to implement electronic promissory notes for Direct Loans, which will eliminate the printing, mailing, collecting and re-mailing of approximately 4,500 promissory notes a year. The office has also decided to implement on-line Loan Entrance Counseling at a U. S. Department of Education site for students.  Because the college will receive electronic documentation that the student completed the process, the college can eliminate the current documentation. The electronic documentation can be loaded directly into Banner.  Goals of the financial aid implementation are to streamline processes as much as possible and to reduce or eliminate the need to handle paper whenever possible. The financial aid module is scheduled to be operational for the 2003-2004 academic year, which means a March 3 2003 ìgo liveî date.

For more information about the project, contact Linda DeWitt, Ext. 3006, or visit our web site at http://2011sitearchive.lanecc.edu/lasr/.  For more information about a specific system, contact the following staff:

 Finance     Stan Barker, Ext. 5608
 Human Resources    Linda Simmons, Ext. 5313
 Student     Helen Garrett, Ext. 5686
 Financial Aid    Linda DeWitt, Ext. 3006