As we prepare for the end of the fiscal year, we ask your assistance in ensuring an orderly financial closing process. Please be aware of important information and cut-off dates. While many administrators may be familiar with the past closing process, we ask all administrators to review the information at http://www.uml.edu/year-end-2013 as some information has changed for this year.

At http://www.uml.edu/year-end-2013 you will find:
‘ Cut-off Dates
‘ Cash/Checks
‘ Budgets
‘ Purchasing
‘ BuyWays ‘ new system-wide eProcurement
‘ Procard
‘ Accounts Payable
‘ Travel
‘ Training/Assistance/Information

The Purchasing Office will hold information sessions on year-end procedures on Tuesday, June 4 from 9’10 a.m. in Cumnock Hall Trustees Room; and on Thursday, June 6 from 2’3 p.m. in Dugan Hall, Room 105. For information, demonstrations, and training sessions on UMass BuyWays, the new system-wide eProcurement system going live on July 1, please see the UMass BuyWays web page.

Comments concerning the year-end process and training programs may be addressed to ControllerFeedback@uml.edu. Thank you for your cooperation in assisting a successful closing.

Over the weekend SUMMIT dashboards for Finance and HR Directwas upgraded to version 11G and is now available. This upgrade is mostly technical in nature however you will notice a few changes to prompts, navigation and general formatting. This upgrade puts us in a position to utilize new technology and featuresenabling us to roll out enhancements in the near future.

Below is important information you should be aware of regarding the upgrade.

Logging in for the First Time?

‘ New URL ‘ If you log into Summit from the Empac home page or HR Direct, no action is required. If you have saved the Summit URL as a favorite, please use the new URL to access SUMMIT.For more information, please see

Summit Upgrade – updating your bookmarks.pdf

‘ Home Page ‘you will notice the home page has changed. To access your dashboards use the ‘Dashboard’ drop down list found at the top mid right

A list of your available dashboards will appear, click on the dashboard you would like to access, note Finance dashboards are listed under FDM Reports and HR dashboards are listed under HCM Reports.

You do have the ability to save a default dashboard and bypass the home page, see detailed instructions—

Summit 11G Setting a Default Dashbaord.pdf

What’s New?

‘ Filters ‘ now include the ability to access a search function to find criteria based upon text entered. Clicking the More/Search’ Box will open a pop-up window which allows you to search for the criteria.

‘ Apply Button ‘ this button replaces the ‘GO’ button, use this button to retrieve your data.

‘ Reset Button ‘ this button replaces the ‘Clear Filter’ button, use this button to clear your filter criteria.

‘ Return to Summary link ‘ this now appears as a link rather than a button and can be found at the top and bottom of most Activity pages.

‘ Export Link – replaces the Download/Print option on individual widgets, accessing this link will give you the option to download to PDF, Excel, PowerPoint, Web, or to download data only.

If you have any questions or issues please email Maura Shield at Maura_Shield@uml.edu or Nancy Ritchie at Nancy_Ritchie@uml.edu

As planned, the Summit system is now unavailable for finance and human resource dashboard reporting. The Summit system is being upgraded to version 11g of Oracle’s enterprise reporting / business intelligence software.The project team began the upgrade process starting at 5:30pm Fridayand expectto release the updatedsystem for all users byTuesday afternoon.

More information will be posted on http://empac.uml.edu as the new system becomes available.

This coming weekend we will be upgrading SUMMIT Financials and HR dashboards. While most of the changes are technical in nature you will notice a few changes to prompts, navigation and general formatting. Please make use of the attached

Summit Fundamentals Quick Reference Guide_v11g.doc.

The go-live date for the new version of SUMMIT is scheduled for Tuesday, April16^th SUMMIT will be unavailable beginning Friday April12^that 5:30pm until mid-day on Tuesday April 16^th. We will notify users as soon as SUMMIT is available.

Please note: Saved filters or prompts you currently use in SUMMIT will not be available in the upgraded version. You will be able to recreate your prompts once the system is available, therefore you may want to make note of your saved filters and prompts before the system becomes unavailable on Friday April 12^th at 5:30pm.

Summit Training sessions are being offered this Fall to support Finance System users. This training will focus on access to the Finance System dashboards that support department administrators, managers, and PIs.

Training is conducted by the Comptroller’s Office with Maura Shield as the lead contact.

Training dates:
Friday November 9 9-11:00 O’Leary 237
Wednesday November 14 2-4:00 Southwick 302
Monday November 19 9-11:00 O’Leary 237

Tuesday November 20 2-4:00 Southwick 302 (CANCELLED)

See the first newsletter on this exciting new purchasing tool being implemented at UMass.

• Introducing UMass BuyWays.pdf

NOTICE: Deans’ Quarterly Report by College ‘ Sponsored Projects

There is a new report that has been placed out on the Academic Admin & PI dashboards in Summit called ‘Deans’ Quarterly Report by College ‘ Sponsored Projects’. The report can be used by all who have access to the Academic Admin & PI dashboards in Summit. The report returns quarterly expenditure data based on the criteria that you select on the main page. Attached are instructions on how to run the report and retrieve the data.

Deans Report navigation Guide (pdf)

NOTICE: Planned Maintenance Production Outage ‘ Saturday September 22nd.

During the morning of Saturday, September 22, a maintenance event will occur in the Production South Street Shrewsbury Data Center. This event will result in multiple services being offline as noted below. This is an expansion of a normal monthly maintenance window. It has been expanded due to the amount of work required and the estimated time to complete
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

WHAT: All services housed in the production South Street Data Center will be unavailable.

WHEN: Saturday September 22, 2012 from 4:00 am until 12 noon.

WHY: Primarily UITS will be upgrading data storage software and introducing new equipment into the data center. These changes will provide enhanced performance and reliability for the applications in the data center.

IMPACT FOR FINANCE APPLICATIONS: From 4:00 am until noon on Saturday September 22, services in the Production, South Street, data center will be unavailable. This includes:

• Finance Production PeopleSoft (e*mpac)
• Summit Reporting
• ECRT (Effort Certification)
• SharePoint(Workspaces)
• E-mail to umassp.edu. We will not be able to respond to any e-mails for part or all of this downtime window.

Yesterday afternoon, at approximately 4:45 PM,the University Information Technology Services (UITS) data center experienced a software failure at the storage level oftheir infrastructure. Unfortunately, although they designedtheir systems to be redundant and able to withstand this type of event, that wasn’t the case in this situation. Although roughly half ofthe (redundant) servers were not directly impacted, users could still not access many of our applications.UITS escalated tothe vendor immediately and their technical team was fully engaged to resolve the situation. Systems were starting to come up around 9:00 PM, that process continued for 1-2 hours. UITS and our Lowell campus resources will review this event thoroughly and will incorporate changes to systems and operationsas appropriate.

All IT groups sincerely apologize for the inconvenience and disruption this event caused.

If you have suggestions on how Lowell can better manage these outages, please email our Administrative Systems Integration team at asi@uml.edu