The Sponsors of the University’s ERP, which includes the ConnectCarolina project, made this announcement on August 28, 2012:
As you may know, the University is well along in a process to replace all of our aging legacy administrative systems with PeopleSoft as part of our ConnectCarolina project. Our student systems were replaced with PeopleSoft Campus Solutions and efforts have been underway for some time on similar implementations of our University financial and human resources systems. This memo is intended to provide you an update on the remaining implementation schedule for this critical initiative.
The ConnectCarolina project team’s initial thinking was to deploy the finance and human resources/payroll components of PeopleSoft in a phased approach, with the PeopleSoft finance modules implemented in July 2013 and human resources/payroll following several months later in October. However, the project team and the ConnectCarolina Executive Sponsors have continued to carefully assess and analyze deployment options and it has now been determined that the University would be best served by implementing the PeopleSoft financial and human resources modules all together in January 2014 rather than using a phased approach as previously thought.
This revised implementation schedule was determined after extensive discussions with our PeopleSoft consulting team, functional subject matter experts both from administrative offices and campus units, as well as members of our ConnectCarolina Finance and Human Resources Stakeholder Committees. The primary reasons for this “all-at-once” approach are complicated, but come down to two key points. The most significant was the difficulty in a phased approach of operating our financial systems in PeopleSoft for an initial three months while our human resources and payroll operations continue to run on our aging legacy systems. This would have required building interfaces to keep the data in sync, particularly between Payroll and Finance, and would have presented a challenge to schools, departments and other University units. The complexities of keeping differing systems reconciled and operating smoothly until everything was moved to PeopleSoft was deemed too difficult and risky. And secondly, given the timing of our annual EPA annual raise process (which typically occurs in September/October) as well as a number of factors dealing with calendar year-end reporting from Payroll such as W-2’s, significant advantages became apparent in bringing all of these new systems online together in January rather than at different times in a phased approach.
Details of the implementation will continue be shared with campus on an ongoing basis. But we wanted to communicate this update regarding our implementation timeline for the remaining finance and human resources components of the ConnectCarolina project.