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

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

FINANCE
Lane has been live with Banner Finance for three months. Things are going very well. Small changes to the purchasing approval queues have made them work quite smoothly, and the college's managerial and executive staff are successfully using the electronic approval processes. We will be doing more staff training in October on general Banner Finance and purchasing for managers and departmental staff. We are making progress in posting the Adopted Budget to Banner from the legacy computer system, COCO. We have actually posted the Adopted Budget to the TEST database and the Budget Office is reviewing the transactions line by line to insure correctness. Budget managers should have access to their budgets in the live system by mid-October. We will have our SCT consultant on campus October 15, 16 & 17 for training on Fixed Asset accounting in Banner.

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 ëExpressLane'.  Discussions are ongoing with the faculty union on contract language modifications necessary to fully implement Banner HR.  The classified union and managers have agreed to the new semi-monthly lag payroll processing. The team is working intensively on building position records in Banner and on testing over 100 process scenarios. Work is on schedule for the parallel payroll 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 November 2002.  

STUDENT
The Student Core Team is beginning to build validation tables and the Lane catalog in the PPRD (pre-production) database, in preparation for the Student ìgo liveî. The catalog needs to be ready in time for instructional departments to develop sections and schedules for the 2003-2004 year. The team is also working on refining plans related to admissions process and registration.  Work is progressing on aligning the refund period, the administrative drop process and financial aid disbursements.  Goals of this work are to improve service to students, to simplify the process for faculty and to make the best use of available seats in classes. The team is also working on a data conversion strategy and schedule. The student system will be "live" for the 2003-2004 academic year.

SERIES 25 AND SCHEDULING
The Series 25 software package has two components ñ classroom scheduling and events scheduling ñ and it is designed to operate with our Banner software.  Our primary goal with this conversion project is to design and implement an effective and efficient room-scheduling system at Lane.  A nine-person advisory group has been created to discuss issues and concerns related to room scheduling that will influence implementation of the Series 25 software.  This advisory group will provide guidance to the four Lane staff who participate in a comprehensive training program conducted by the software manufacturer early in November.  Implementation of the software will begin in earnest after this training and the software will be used to schedule classes at Lane, beginning with Summer Term 2003.

FINANCIAL AID
The Financial Aid Team completed the fourth week of training on September 26.  The session covered fund management, packaging and disbursement, three core processes in financial aid.  During the next two weeks, the team will build the financial aid fund structure in the PPRD database and will test packaging and disbursement processes in the TEST database. The team will also resolve issues around scholarship funds and awards and tracking other external funding resources, such as Veterans' Benefits and sponsoring contracts. 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