FAQ

The simple answer is that our existing system does not meet the needs of our growing campus and key components will soon be phased out.

UC Merced’s financial systems date back to the early 1980s, when the operating environment was substantially less complex than it is today. It is comprised of a sub-unit in UCLA’s financial system and a suite of home-grown applications.

Because the existing system is not meeting the campus’ needs, there are numerous shadow systems being used to manage data. These unconnected systems lack standardized processes and controls, which contribute to risks to compliance and information security, as well as data integrity issues.

Additionally, UCLA is planning to sunset the existing system we depend on and switch to a Oracle Software as a Service (SaaS) based system; as a result, UC Merced will need to have a replacement financial system in place. Since 2017, UC Merced, in partnership with UCOP, has been evaluating various options to replace the university’s existing financial system. After due diligence, a decision was made in September 2018 to replace our financial system with an Oracle SaaS-based integrated financial system.

The implementation of Oracle Financials is a milestone for UC Merced’s financial management capability that aligns with UC’s Cloud First Strategy. It will modernize our financial systems and processes and lays the foundation for dramatically improving access to financial data. A modern financial system will deliver functionality that is currently distributed on shadow systems, meaning campus will have one reliable, accessible source of truth for financial transactions, business process execution, and reporting. This will reduce the administrative burden associated with conducting basic financial management activities. Finally, we will have the ability to transform how work is done in the future by converting manual processes to automated procedures that save time, increase accuracy, and enhance our reporting ability.

UC Merced has partnered with Deloitte to assist with the implementation of the Oracle Applications Cloud. The company is providing functional and technical expertise for the implementation and integration of the new system, as well as supporting business process mapping and optimization, project management, change management, and training. UC Merced is responsible for the overall leadership of the project and for staffing each workstream with experts to advise the configuration of the cloud and to design the new business processes.

The project team anticipates it will be production-ready in December 2020 for a go-live date in January in 2021 (following the campus holiday break, or curtailment).

There are pros and cons to performing a mid-fiscal year financial system cutover. Going live at fiscal close provides a clean break from the old to new system; a mid-year go-live requires additional planning related to conversion of balances, reconciliations, and financial reporting. Universities have successfully gone live with large financial enterprise resource planning systems at the fiscal close and at mid-year; both options are feasible. We believe the period during curtailment when systems are quiet provides additional opportunity to test and validate before business resumes in 2021. In regard to conversion, the Alpha Financials team plans to convert historical summarized General Ledger balance activity from July 1, 2018 through December 31, 2020. Historical detailed journal transactions will remain available for reference in the legacy UCLA-hosted General Ledger system.

The goal of Alpha Financials is to ensure UC Merced has the infrastructure in place to deliver high-value, reliable, and easy-to-access financial services that allow the campus to focus on our mission of teaching, research and public service. Alpha Financials benefits campus in several ways:

Campus will have one reliable, accessible source of truth for financial transactions, business process execution, and reporting; this reduces risk associated with data integrity, compliance, and information security.

By reducing manual work and automating key processes DFA will be better equipped to serve our campus customers resulting in reduced turn-around time, increased accuracy, and enhanced reporting ability.

Campus will see less duplication of effort and administrative tasks thanks to improved data integrity and improved quality of system output and reporting.

Oracle Applications Cloud is a cloud-based Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. It is a modern, agile suite of integrated applications that undergo periodic updates automatically to improve functionality.

The UCLA Ascend team is working on the data archiving strategy for UC Merced for all financial records housed in UCLA system to ensure records retention requirements are achieved.

The physical location segment was structured with two different parent levels.

One parent level has child values for locations on campus and the other has child values for locations off campus. The CAAN identifiers were not used as values for locations because for many locations, there is not a 1 to 1 CAAN to location relationship.

As an example, the Bookstore, Lantern Café, and the Library are all common locations that have a physical location segment value, but only the Library building has a CAAN number.

A new Common Chart of Accounts (CCoA) is needed for the following reasons:

• UCOP has mandated the Common Chart of Accounts (CCoA) systemwide, as part of an effort to increase UC system-wide reporting and measurement capabilities.
• FAU segments are used inconsistently across campus. Defined fields (e.g., Cost Center) are often interpreted differently in each unit and used in a variety of ways; free-form fields (e.g., Project, Source), if used, are for a variety of unique purposes. This inconsistent use of fields makes meaningful reporting at the broader institutional level difficult. The fields in the new CCoA will be strictly defined and controlled to maintain institutional integrity.
• Comingling of data in a single FAU field has led to duplication of values and inflexibility in reporting. These “nested” values prevent consistent departmental and institutional-level reporting.
• Certain internal reporting capabilities are becoming more important (e.g., activity by interdisciplinary program), but UC Merced lacks the ability to determine this information with the current FAU structure.

Our team has been diligently gathering change impacts – the difference between what each of the Alpha Financials stakeholder groups do or see today, and what the future will be. We are working to validate those change impacts with Central Office Strategic Partners to refine and inform end user training. End users are everyone from the most technical finance accountants who will be living in the system every day, to campus department RAs who will occasionally need to find relevant finance data.

We are analyzing a crosswalk between all of our stakeholders (over 20 unique groups) and the functionality and reporting capability in the system to determine training personas. These personas will help us build a detailed training plan that will include appropriate amounts of instructor-led training, job aids, online tutorials, short videos, or quick references to prepare end users to operate in the system. Training will occur in fall 2020, with some stakeholder groups receiving training once the system is live.

General Accounting is working with the campus to identify accounts that should be closed prior to conversion, which is generally part of the campus fiscal close process. You can anticipate reviews of your accounts and requests to review account statuses by the General Accounting team. With the Alpha Financials project timeline aligned to the beginning of the 2021 calendar year, we don’t foresee major impacts to the 2020 fiscal close process.

We do expect instituting a “pause” on financial transactions prior to go-live to allow for cutover of data and systems. Because of that and some dependencies between departments, fiscal close will look a little different this year. It will be a collaborative effort between departments, with each unit nominating a representative to work as a group to determine the order of operations for close, taking into account dependencies across units.

Cutover will occur at the end of 2020, but the specific dates and details have not been finalized. System design and retrofitting analyses are in progress and will contribute to the detailed cutover plan that the project team will develop. We will share more information on the cutover strategy once it becomes available in early 2020.

Yes—there will be reports that can be run for administrative units for project-based expenditures.

PPFM will work primarily in partnership with the Contract & Grant Administration (CGA) department, a business unit of the Office of Research and Economic Development (ORED), Office of External Relations, and key units within the Division of Finance and Administration (DFA), to support a variety of campus stakeholders, such as Faculty and Research Administrators (among others), involving a host of activities including, but not limited to: Contracts & Grants, faculty funding (e.g. faculty startup, research support, etc.), Gifts & Endowments, Capital Projects, and Institutional Projects.

Below is a high-level visual of the future state end-to-end Contracts/Grants journey – including touchpoints, realms of ownership, and areas of collaboration. Faculty will always initiate the Contracts/Grants process, where it’s then supported by groups within ORED (Note: ORED-CGA will continue to manage guidance, policy and non-financial post award functions from award setup- closeout through solid partnerships with DFA and established relationships with faculty and sponsors) with DFA managing the data within the financial system. From there, ongoing financial management (including regular reporting), compliance (including monitoring and notification of spend limits and allowable spend types) and eventual closeout of Contracts/Grants will be handled by PPFM.

It should be noted that the below diagram 1 represents the existing process; however, modifications to the proposal and awards process are currently being developed in order to increase the level of Faculty support provided. Further, all communications within the green bubble are system generated notices and automated communications from the new Oracle based Alpha Financial System designed to be automatically delivered to Faculty, Research Administrators, and ORED in order to support research.

Live demo sessions on navigating the “ins and outs” of Faculty Portfolio View/Project Portfolio Reporting are being targeted for Fall 2020 depending on progress of data conversion for the Alpha project. The sessions will be geared towards Faculty and Research Administrators who will use the tool more regularly, though all are welcome to join. Additionally, formal training on the use of Faculty Portfolio View/Project Portfolio Reporting will be created by the Alpha Financials Project Training Team in preparation for Oracle Financials system Go-Live slated for January 2021. Stay tuned - more details to come!