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

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

FINANCE
Lane has been live with Banner Finance for four months. In October, the SCT Finance Consultant was on campus to do fixed asset training. The Adopted Budget has been loaded into the production database, and the Budget Office is making final adjustments. When these are completed, the Finance Team will offer ìrefresherî training for departments in budget queries and transfers. 

HUMAN RESOURCES
The Human Resources (HR) Team continues to perform parallel payroll test using Banner. This process will continue through December 2002. Employees are participating in training to learn how to input time and leave records through Banner's Web for Employees, the electronic self-service tool that Lane refers to as 'ExpressLane'. The 500th employee was trained at 11:10 on October 31. Training will continue in November. The general response has been positive and many have commented that the new system is very easy to use. The HR Team is also providing training for managers and administrative assistants on electronic approval of time and leave entered by employees. Data entered during the employee training will be used to teach the manager and administrative assistant classes. The HR Team is also working on employment applicant tracking, which is scheduled to ìgo liveî November 15, 2002. Banner payroll will ìgo liveî in January 2003. 

STUDENT
The Student Core Team has now completed the formal training necessary to learn the basic Banner tools in the Student Module. Future visits with consultant Elliott Hawkey will focus on testing student scenarios in the admissions, registrations and student accounts receivable systems. Conversations are being held to make decisions on a number of implementation issues including the conversion of data from the COCO system, how to handle variable credit classes, Learning Communities and the administrative drop process. Programming staff received three days of consulting in late October with SCT Technical Consultant Joozar Najmi on data conversion schedules and strategies. The student system will be "live" for the 2003-2004 academic year.

SERIES 25 AND SCHEDULING
The Schedule 25 Advisory Group has continued its discussion of issues and concerns related to room scheduling. The group has been considering input provided by staff from instructional divisions about the designation and use of dedicated and priority rooms. These discussions will help guide implementation of the Schedule 25 software and provide a context for the four Lane staff who will participate in a comprehensive training program conducted by the software manufacturer November 4 to 7.

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. The software will be used to schedule classes at Lane, beginning with Summer Term 2003.

FINANCIAL AID
The Financial Aid Banner Team completed the fifth week of training on October 17. The session covered student employment and loan processing. The Financial Aid Banner Team has built the basic structure for applicant tracking, fund structure, student budgets and packaging rules in the PPRD (pre-production) database, and this system set-up has been ìclonedî or copied to the TEST database. A goal of the financial aid implementation is to build an automated system that reviews application information as completely as possible during the initial tracking process in order to electronically identify conditions that formerly required a hand-review of the application. Each of these conditions must be translated into ìrulesî, entered into Banner and tested to ensure that the system is correctly flagging the applicant's record. Then, informational text for each condition must be developed and associated correctly with the applicant's tracking, and letters must be designed and tested. The Financial Aid Banner Team continues to work on developing these scenarios, and is also working with the Student Core Team to identify and test combinations of registration and financial aid disbursement scenarios. 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