Your Ideas Matter

Enhanced Additional Fringe Form

Melissa Bissey noticed the existing Additional Fringe Form needed an overhaul to help address State of Kansas Payroll process changes, create lookup integrations to prevent errors, and improve the workflow to address other process delays.  This new form has multiple benefits. First is an improved workflow which will prevent dependence on manual follow-ups with employees, provide notifications to submitters for progress/errors, and has an integrated employee step to acknowledge the additional fringe compensation.  Additionally, the functionality of the form itself has been improved to include searchable fields to prevent entering incorrect funding and employees from being selected.

With the previous form, there were delays in additional fringe transactions from being processed and required more manual reviews for accuracy.  These improvements not only benefit those involved filling in the form but employees will get paid faster as a result of the new workflow and fewer errors.

Fellow Change Agents:

• Jenni Stinnett
• Brenda Barski
• Pam Burkhead
• Marty White
• Teresa Mock
• Diana Beisner
• Mike Lewis

Impact of idea:

$2,500 annually in efficiency savings

Technology Procurement Review Improvement

Caty Movich began to see many of their units payments being delayed based on needing a Technology Procurement approval.  Caty raised the concern about the lack of communication on this new process, its requirements, and how to complete a request quickly.  The IT and Procurement teams were in the process of redesigning the original attempt at the Technology Procurement approval workflow.  Now the process has been redesigned to create a workflow approval process where multiple approvals can happen simultaneously rather than in a sequential order. This will speed up the review process. In addition to the newly designed workflow, both teams created a communication and training efforts to explain to our campus partners the “why” behind these reviews along with Knowledgebase articles in the Finance Service Portal to help provide further transparency in the process.

Find more details about the process for Technology Purchases in our IT knowledgebase.  Scroll down to the articles with "Technology Purchase" in the name.

Fellow Change Agents:

Caty Movich, Matt Ochs, Bill Rachal, Ben Lizak, Rob Randall, Erin Sommer

Impact of idea:

The improved communication and transparency will lead to less frustration with the process.  The Technology Procurement reviews will also help find duplicate spend on similar software solutions to save KU money in the long run. 

Redesign Rec Services Credit Card Deposits and Student Billing

Gabe Moreno and his team noticed how much time they spent on our old deposit process. They would print receipts, highlight cost centers and tax amounts before taping the receipts to a piece of paper and scan them to their email.  Each day they would then send all the information over to their SSC support, Katie Stone who had to use a combination of their documentation and Fusion sales system reporting to tie back to what was deposited in the bank. In addition to that reconciliation, Katie would manually enter all charges into Enroll & Pay for the activity to be billed to the students account.  They helped redesign the process to use monthly reporting from Fusion for credit card payments and reconcile the whole month at one time rather than daily to eliminate all the printing and scanning student hourly staff had to do each day.  The bill to account process now takes a monthly report and creates a file to automatically post in Enroll & Pay.  This will save about five hours every week for all the staff involved.

Fellow Change Agents:

Katie Stone, Craig Alexander

Impact of idea:

$7,000 annually in efficiency savings

Deposit Process Redesign

Accounting Services struggled in the past with departments turning in accurate deposit forms in a timely manner which led to manual follow ups and reconciliation delays. Wendy Reese and her team designed a process to automatically recognize revenue when deposits settle in our university bank account.  The revenue is recognized in each departments budget by using a default fund, cost center, and account. This change will eliminate delays in reconciliation of our cash accounts, reduce manual follow-ups and drive further efficiencies over time.  

Fellow Change Agents:

Wendy Reese, Erin Monaghan, Reggie Mitchell II, Stephanie Rasys, and Susan Desch

Impact of idea:

$20,000 in annual productivity savings

Automate Collection Notice Emails

Student Accounts partnered with Student Information Systems to automate the monthly disbursement of student collection letters.  Previously we would have a monthly query ran by the Budget office and then over the course of a few days the Student accounts team would manually review the list to remove students who shouldn't get a notice and then send out the letters manually in batches through email.  The criteria for this review was the same every month.  Our Student Information Systems team took the original query, built in the criteria to automatically filter the student list appropriately and disburse the letters through Enroll & Pay.  This process is completely automated now with the work these teams did together because they were willing to look at the process holistically and make it better.

Fellow Change Agents:

Deborah Rollf, Mandy Tucker, Angie Dopp, Justin Carroll, Dee Anna Rendall, and Kevin Kenn

Impact of idea:

$3,600 annually in efficiency savings