Author Archives: Norma Clark

Time Reporting for Hurricane Sandy on 10/29/12

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Employees are reminded to update their time reporting to reflect the University Closure on Monday, October 29th.

Staff should see the following job aid:

Non-essential personnel should put in their regularly scheduled hours (standard is 7.5) using the University Closed (UCLSD) code. Non-essentail personnel do not earn comp time on a day UMass Lowell is official closed even if they work for a few hours from home or came into the office.

A new job aid for police as essentail employees to report time is now available in the “Information for Police” section and is also posted below:

Planned Maintenance Outage on Sat.,9/22

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NOTICE: Planned Maintenance Outage

During the morning of Saturday, September 22, 2012 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: From 4:00 am until noon on Saturday, September 22, all services in the Production South Street data center will be unavailable. This includes:

‘ HR Direct and all PeopleSoft Production applications

‘ Identity Management (IdM)

‘ Summit and Cognos/RDS

‘ Sharepoint (Workspaces)

‘ Citrix

‘ Other 3rd party and Departmental applications

‘ Exchange email at UITS (notLowell)’ please note that no emails to President’s Office staff (including UITS) will be sent or delivered during this time

Apology for 9/10/12 Service Interruption

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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

8/7/12 – Attention Department Administators — Fall Semester New & Rehire Information

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Timely hiring for the new academic year – In order to ensure that temporary employees (adjunct faculty, hourly staff, students, etc.) in your department are processed and paid in a timely manner, please complete and submit to Payroll the Personnel Action Form (PAF) for new and returning employees for the 2012 fall semester as soon as possible. The Personnel Action Form along with instructions and information on how new hires can electronically complete and submit new hire employment paperwork can be found at http://www.uml.edu/hr/Temporary-Hires.html.

June 2012 – Floating Holiday Information

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Sunday, June 17th is Bunker Hill Day and is a floating holiday for some UMass employees. As the holiday is on a Sunday, the official holiday will be celebrated on Monday, June 18th.

Benefitted employees, who work on the holiday, earn compensatory time that can be used at a later date.

Employees who need to report time for working on June 18th should review theFloating Holiday job aid.

5/10/12 – Manager Time Approval Training Available

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All managers are invited to attend a Time Approval class. These classes are being offered as an additional method for users to learn how toreview and approve their employees time.

Feel free to attend if you are a new supervisor or if you’ve been using it for a while and just want to make sure you’re using all the functionality. HR/Payroll staff will be available to answer questions on both HR Direct and campus policy and procedures.

Four classes have been scheduled and more will be added if needed.

  • Thursday, May 31 from 1PM-3PM in Oleary 237
  • Wednesday, June 6 from 11AM-1PM in Southwick 302.
  • Wednesday, June 20 from 11AM-1PM in O’Leary 237
  • Thursday, June 21 from 1PM-3PM in Southwick 302

To sign up for a class, please email Norma Clark (norma_clark@uml.edu).

4/24/12 – Understanding Time Administration to Approve Time

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Managersoften ask whythey can’t immediately approve time after an employee enters it in HR Direct. If you are a manager and want to know more, please continue reading.

The short answer is a process called Time Administration.

Before a manager can approve any reported time, a PeopleSoft process called Time Administration needs to run to completion. Time Administration takes the”reported time” and processes it through a rules engine and turns it into “payable time”. If there are any errors, they will be stored as exceptions — those need to be fixed before the employee can be paid for those hours in error.

Example (Student Hourly Employee) – if person reported 9 hours worked ina day, the time administration would convert that to 8 hours at straight time & 1 hour of overtime

Example (Salaried Professional) – if a person reported 4.0 hours Vacation and nothing else, then time administration would move the day into error (exception) as there needs to be an off-setting 3.5 hours of Regular time to make the employee day whole.

UMass managers are only approving time that has been successfully processed by Time Administration and turned into “Payable Time”. This process is usually run a couple times per day (See below).

When should I approve time?

The suggested best time to approve is on “Approval Monday”. Employees should have reported time by the Sunday following the close of the pay period. Then time administration would have run and is available for the managers to approve all day Monday. Early approval is possible once you understand the cycles for Time Administration and set necessary expectations with your staff.

When does Time Administration run?

The Time Administration process is run in batchat 12 PM (Noon) and 5 PM on most days. The process takes up to60 minutesto complete. Sofor example if employee reports time in HR Direct prior to Noon, then it should be available for a manager to approve after 1 PM.

On the “Approval Monday”, the Time Administration Process runs a bit more frequently

  • 9:30 AM
  • 12:30 PM
  • 3:30 PM
  • 8:00 PM
  • 12:00 AM (Midnight)

When I make an update to an employees reported time via manager self-service, do I still need to wait for Time Administration to run before I can approve it?

YES. All reported time (regardless of entry point) needs to run through Time Administration before it can be approved.

NOTE: This blog entry was originally posted on 10/13/10. Updates made 11/15/11 and 4/24/12

Evacuation Day Holiday on Friday, 3/16 – INSTRUCTIONS ON REPORTING TIME

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Evacuation Floating Holiday – Saturday March 17th is the Evacuation floating holiday. Observance of this holiday will be on Friday March 16th for employees in eligible bargaining units.

Employees who work on Friday, March 16th will need to make updates to their time reporting.

For time reporting instructions, please see Floating Holiday Job Aid(PDF)