Success Gallery

The amount of data loaded into various budget tables is massive. New data must be entered every summer in preparation for the new fiscal year. Previously, the Payroll/HR Systems Team (PHRST) and departmental users had to work together to load thousands of budget entries. A third-party application, Mercury’s QuickTest, was used to load the data into EIS. QuickTest is a key stroke emulator designed for entering test data into an enterprise system component. Each entry can take several minutes. The amount of data required by UNT’s budget could easily take several days to load using multiple computers. It is a time consuming process requiring constant monitoring of rejected entries. To complicate matters, the loading can only be done during non-business hours to avoid data conflict with online users during normal work days.

UNT Student Administration departments have been working over the past several months on a significant collaborative effort to automatically charge repeat tuition when a student takes a course for the third time. The tuition charge had previously been added to a student’s account midway through the semester in which the class was taken. This improvement has made significant progress in delivering good customer service to students. It allows for better financial planning and scheduling options that may be available to some students.

Teamwork to reach this improvement was required between staff in Student Accounting, Student Records, the Registrar’ Office, and the Student Financials Systems Development Team. “All of these groups are to be commended for their cooperation and for going the extra mile to help students to succeed,” says Kayle Godinez, Director of Student Accounting at UNT.

The UNT Health Science Center (HSC) has recently implemented the EIS Gradebook functionality within the Faculty and Student Center portals for the Physician Assistant and Premedical Science Program. UNTHSC Programmer Analyst, Prafulla Srinivasan, reports that this new functionality assists faculty and department chairs in better monitoring a student’s progress during a class instead of waiting until the end of a term. This added functionality also allows students to view their assignments, grades, and instructor comments from within their own EIS Student Center. “This is a very valuable feature that should promote our retention efforts at UNTHSC, “says Thomas Morrman, Ed.D., Vice President for Student Affairs. “This implementation will provide the Center for Academic Performance the ability to offer timely interventions for students experiencing academic challenges.”

Future plans include releasing the module to other schools and departments within the UNTHSC.

The upgrade to the Oracle PeopleSoft Financials software from version 8.4 to 9.0 is almost upon us. The conversion process is scheduled to begin at noon on Friday, March 13th, and be completed Monday afternoon, March 16th. The EIS Financials system will be available once again to users at all campuses on the following Tuesday, March 17, 2009.

Every effort has been made to minimize the impact of the upgrade on the users of the Financials system. The unavailability of EIS Financials is not very problematic since the upgrade schedule is taking advantage of UNT’s holiday for Spring Break on Monday, March 16th. Since the campus is closed for the holiday, the only time that the system will be unavailable to UNT users during regular business hours will be in the afternoon of Friday, March 13th. Though the UNT Health Science Center (HSC) is open on March 16th, the EIS Financials environment will not be accessible to HSC users that day.

The EIS Tools, Applications, Reporting, and Portal (EISTARP) team is currently working to upgrade the EIS Portal System (my.unt.edu) to Oracle PeopleSoft Portal, version 9.0. The upgrade provides new and exciting functionality, such as community calendars, improved content management, collaborative workspaces and discussion forums.

With this upgrade, the EISTARP team is making major improvements to the look and feel of the portal. The upgrade goal is to make myUNT a student-centered portal that makes doing business with UNT an intuitive experience. The improved myUNT includes a softer look with simple navigation and Web 2.0 style graphics. The new design also allows the Portal to be more accessible on hand-held mobile devices.