REVISED INFORMATION 11/25/09

To reduce confusion related to the issue described below, the Human Resource office has removed the “Total Scheduled Hours” and “Total Deviation” from the self-service timesheet. Self-service timesheets now look like this:

ORIGINAL POST 11/23/09

Employeesmay noticemissing scheduled hours as displayed on the HR Direct Timesheet page for Salaried Employees (Exception Reporters). We have reviewed this with our UITS resources and they have confirmed there is software bug in how this is displayed, BUT this will not have any impact on your payroll calculation. No action needed.

If you are interested in the details, here is a full explanation of this software bug:

In any week that includes a holiday, the timesheet won’t display the scheduled hours for all scheduled days that follow the holiday. So, for example, if the holiday falls on a Monday, pretty much the whole week doesn’t display. If it falls on a Wednesday then scheduled days after Wednesday won’t display the scheduled hours.

Below is an example of what is displayed on the Timesheet view for a full-time 37.5 hour employee this week. Note the missing scheduled hours on Friday. Also the total for the week isn’t correct.

Again, no action needed. This display of hours is informational only and there is no adverse impact on payroll. It is a known Oracle issue and will be fixed in a future patch from them.

The Human Resource office has revised the policy regarding the reporting of time.Henceforth, salaried employees are only required to report exceptions to their scheduled time for each pay period. Time does not need to be recorded every week.

An employee who has no exceptions in a pay period does not need to do any HR Direct data entry. In fact, you do not need to login unless you have exceptions to report.

Exceptions include vacation, sick, personal, bereavement, jury duty, and a few others.

A Holiday is an unscheduled day and therefore not an exception –no data entry is required.

Employees should be accurately reporting their time by the established deadlines for each pay period. The normal system deadline is the Sunday prior to Pay Day at 5:00 p.m..Accuratereporting of timeis a responsiblity of both the employee and manager.

Effective 10/16/09 all travel expenses, travel advances, and expense reimbursements will be distributed through your Human Resource Paycheck.For more information please see the newFact Sheet:Pay Advice for Expense Reimburement(pdf) or visit the Travel Guidelines web page.

UMass Lowell is committed to reducing our carbon footprint and thinking about new ways to conduct business in a more environmentally friendly manner. There are a few significant ‘Green Initiatives’ that are being introduced as part of the continued rollout of the upgraded Human Resource system, called HR Direct. While these are ‘Green Initiatives’, they are also changes which benefit employees and improve the efficiency of our operations.

Green Initiative #1 – You Don’t Need Our Advice to Go Green!:

HR Direct allows employees to view their pay advice online and is also available a day earlier than the printed advice. Employees are encouraged to voluntarily opt out of receiving a printed pay advice. To turn your pay advice GREEN please send an email to hr@uml.edu stating you’d like to stop receiving a printed pay advice.

Green Initiative #2 – Direct Deposit of Travel Reimbursements & Advances:

Beginning with the October 16^th payroll, employees will now receive travel reimbursements & advances directly in your bi-weekly pay check. This will have a positive environmental impact as UMass will eliminate multiple cycles of printing and distribution of reimbursement checks. Employees get the benefit of having a single process to receive paychecks and reimbursements from the University.

Green Initiative #3 ‘ Self-Service Time Reporting:

Almost 500 employees are currently reporting their time via HR Direct self service and no longer are completing paper timesheets. This significant reduction in paperwork will save users and departments from printing, authorizing, and storing all this paper. This alone will reduce our campus consumption of paper by an estimated 100,000 sheets per year. The Human Resource Office expects to roll this out to all departments by the end of the year.

We continue to introduce new departments into HR Direct for self-service time reporting.The goal is to complete the rollout to administrative offices by the end of November. No definitive planhas been set as toif/how/when faculty will be added totime and labor self service. We also have not confirmed when we will add student employees into HR Direct as we continue to haveissues with getting their logon securityfully established.

The conservative rollout strategy has been necessary to to allow the Human Resource office sufficient time to work with end users and make necessary adjustments to their employee data.As this is the first time we’ve built in a workflow approval there is a lot work which goes into establishing the employee reporting lines within the HR system.

Here are some numbers as of the first of October.

• 739 employees have logged into HR Direct
• 70% of employees who are using HR Direct have logged in at least once during the last 2 weeks (one pay period)
• 374 employees are reporting their own time via HR Direct self-service
• 96 managers are approving time via HR Direct

A couple new initiatives ongoing include:

1. Employee Expenses will soon be included within a paycheck. There will no longer be separate checks.
2. Pay Advice statements are now posted online the Thursday before pay day – i.e. one day earlier
3. Employee can voluntarily suppress their pay advice. To do so, just email HR@uml.edu
4. The time reporting schedule is still being evaluated. There is increased pressure on the HR office to fix errors on the critical Tuesday. Ideally something can change to give them more time to fix these and ensure employees get paid correctly.
5. We are in the process of developinga survey to assess the usability and functionality of HR Direct. In the mean time if you have feedback please post here or send an email to Richard_Conley@uml.edu

Employees can now accessyour pay advice online via HR Direct! If you would like to STOP receiving a paper pay advice all you need to is email me from your university email account and I’ll take care of it. richard_conley@uml.edu

We have now been using the HR Direct 9.0 application for the last few months. There continue to be ongoing changes and updates to improve operations and reporting.

Basic Self Service
The number of people who have logged into HR Direct is a bit disappointing, but I also understand that there is no real reason people currently have to log-in. The functionality of self-service is still very basic with the most tangible feature being the viewing of paycheck advice messages. So far about 29% of campusemployees have accessed the system at least once. Students do not yet have access and we’ve had to delay when access will be provided until the fall. By delaying to the fall we will be able to have students login using their campus student email accounts rather than issuing them new user id’s which was our initial plan.

Time and Labor Self Service
We have been piloting time reporting and approving using the new HR Direct and the general feedback has been positive. There are some enhancements that we are requesting (not sure if they will get made), but nothing too significant. Therefore, we are beginning a full campus rollout of this functionality. As there is a lot of setup required for each person, this won’t be done all at once. Instead there will be a couple departments added each payperiod and hopefully by the end of the year we will have everyone using this instead of paper timesheets.

Go Green — Get Advice Online
We will be launching a campaign to allow employees to stop receiving a printed pay advice. These pay advices are all available online and hence we can reduce the paper and distribution costs. If you would like to have your printed pay advice stopped, please just send me an email with your employee ID, name, and request to stop advice.

Closing FY09
Clearly the reports and integration with finance at the end of the fiscal year was disappointing, but hopefully those issues are resolved as we begin FY2010. I can attest to the fact that the consultants and President’s Office staff worked extensively on these issues, but in the end were just not able to make things work exactly the way we wanted. Much thanks to the campusdeparmentsfor their adaptability to this payroll encumbrancechallenge. In particular,kudos to theBudget Office for assuming added responsibility to evaluate true budget balances and make overrides as appropriate.

New Administrative Systems Integration website
We now have a new campus web page for the Administrative Systems Integration office. (who? — read more). We will be soon seeking input from all users on their experience using HR Direct and other systems. You are strongly encouraged to voice your opinion and help shape the future direction of these administrative technology tools.

Update on the HR Direct Go-Live ‘ June 5, 2009

We are now at the end of the third payroll cycle and ithas been one month sincewe went live with HR Direct. The number of self-service users is lower than we hoped, so if you haven’t logged-in yet we do encourage you to do so. All you need is your email address and password!

Overall, the grand majority of processes are working well and employees are getting paid correctly. The following are a couple issues and current status updates:

Financial Integration

As part of the HR Direct implementation the method by which payroll encumbrance and detailed financial data integrates with the PeopleSoft Financials system has changed significantly. Since go-live there have been issues identified and the majority of them have been resolved, but there could still be errors with payroll encumbrance data. Offices are urged to use caution when reviewing financial reports as they could be overstating balances. The campus Budget Office is actively working with UITS to review fixes to the data and has been communicating with Finance System users about this issue.

Payroll Commitment Report

As a result of the new financial integration process, there are also downstream reporting issues which have prevented UITS from successfully delivering the Payroll Commitment Report (UMCA801). This report is heavily used by Lowell departments to help manage the remaining hours/dollars on a person’s contract. Offices are still responsible for managing their employees and are accountable for all authorized hours. Please note that employees will continue to get paid for any hours you authorize regardless of budget available on the contract as long as there is money in the account. UITS informed us this morning that they are hoping to have these run later today or by ‘Monday at the latest’.

Leave Accrual Print Error

On last weeks pay check advice some employees saw an inflated leave accrual balance due to a processing error. This primarily impacted employees who have worked at other UMass campuses or are currently an hourly employee after previously being a benefited employee (e.g. Retirees who have returned as hourly). This is a printing error only and true balances are in the PeopleSoft system. UITS is actively working to correct the paycheck print process for next week’s payroll. As the self-service PDF paychecks are exact copies of the printed advices, those too have the incorrect values.

Time and Labor Pilot

The pilot is going well and we are learning a lot about the challenges of changing business processes. We currently have 37 employees participating and 5 managers. We will expand a bit over the next month and then will evaluate the process. We have received some feedback and will be making some requests for enhancements to this functionality and will be updating our training job aids and the UPK.

If you have questions or issues pleaselet us know.

Today employees received their first pay check from the upgraded HR Direct application. In addition to the printed advice employees can also view their own information via employee self service. To login, all you need is your UML email account and password.