Work Continues on Finance/HR Data Warehouse Project

July 27, 2010

Earlier this month, vendor Millennium Computer Systems, based in Victoria, B.C., was selected for the Finance/HR Data Warehouse project. Since then, Susan Banton and her team from the Purchasing Department have finalized the signing of the contract.

Implementation team members Wanna VanCuren, project manager, and team leads Bob Schneider, IT; Shonda Shipman, Finance Reporting; Vic Kiel, HR/Training; Diana Cline, Budget Reporting; and Teresa Mroczkiewicz, Process & Procedural Change; have been working closely with the consultants from Millennium to finalize an initial implementation plan. Paul Cocke, lead for the Internal Marketing Communications Committee, drafted a detailed communication plan to provide regular updates of this project to the campus.

At the same time, IT Team members from ADMCS and Technical Services are working to complete the server configuration, creation of the databases and to deliver a fully functional test environment to the implementation teams.

The implementation plan will include the system design and configuration phase during July; the training phase/“Train-The-Trainers” training (Technical & Functional); Aug. 9 to 25; and then the testing phase in September.

A data warehouse is a central repository, or storehouse, for data that an enterprise's various business systems collect. At WWU, data from Banner (and later on from other sources) is selectively extracted and organized in the data warehouse for access and analysis purpose. The aim of the Finance/HR data warehouse project is to acquire a more user-friendly query/reporting tool to interface with one or more Banner modules, including Finance, Human resources and Budget. This data warehouse will provide a single source of data for end-users to expediently track, manage and analyze their information. This new tool will become one of the campus standards for reports.

For more information on this project, including a list of frequently asked questions about the project, visit the data warehouse project website.