By Heather Calhoun
UHCLIDIAN STAFF

University of Houston-Clear Lake faculty and staff have been adjusting to a new vendor-supported software program called PeopleSoft.

PeopleSoft was fully implemented at UH-Clear Lake last September and has been partially implemented throughout the rest of the UH-System.

PeopleSoft contains financial, human resource and student administration modules. The human resources and financial modules are implemented at all UH campuses.

UH-Clear Lake is the only university in the UH System to implement PeopleSoft's student administration software.

"The Board of Regents and Chancellor Smith decided to first incorporate PeopleSoft at UH-Clear Lake because the software used at the Clear Lake campus needed to be updated to better serve students' needs," said Steven Sutton, associate dean in the Student Information and Assistance Office.

"PeopleSoft has not been completely installed at the other UH campuses because presently there is no critical need for a student administration software update."

"The student administration modules allow for efficient Web registration and payment of tuition and fees," said Rose Sklar, registrar/senior associate director of enrollment services. "The software will eventually give students the opportunity to see their academic history, run a degree audit and allow for students to perform Œwhat if' scenarios on their degree plans."

The UH System allotted $36.5 million to get PeopleSoft up and running on all UH campuses within three years. As of July, the UH System has spent $29 million implementing PeopleSoft.

"The money spent is being tracked at the system level and there are funds left for the rest of the implementation," said Glen Houston, vice president for information resources.

As with any new software program, PeopleSoft has created some problems for UH-Clear Lake's faculty and staff.

"Most of the problems UH-Clear Lake has experienced with PeopleSoft are the normal transitions from one software package to a new software package," Sklar said. "These problems mainly occurred with the student financials and financial aid aspect of the system."

"Processing financial aid in PeopleSoft is taking longer than before, but part of it is the learning curve," said Darlene Biggers, associate vice president and dean of students. "With PeopleSoft you must now pull down something like 10 screens instead of one screen just to see the information that you need."

Biggers said the financial aid program the university uses has been linked to PeopleSoft.

"Before students had to go to the cashier's office, the financial aid office and enrollment services just to have their financial aid questions answered," Biggers said. "Now students are able to go to one office because all of the offices are linked to PeopleSoft."

Some users on campus are finding PeopleSoft to be labor-intensive.

"PeopleSoft has some potential, but it is a very cumbersome system," said Jody Rodriquez, contract administrator in the purchasing office. "We are still trying to iron the wrinkles out. I would say that PeopleSoft is user friendly challenged."

"I mainly do vendor orders and with PeopleSoft in order to contact vendors and make orders I must get the vendors' numbers from the phone book to call them," said Cathy Garrett, procurement specialist. "The vendors' numbers are not in the system and we must fax the vendor information to the UH system where someone inputs all vendor information by hand into the system, which is very time consuming. PeopleSoft is not working very well as of now."

"The PeopleSoft student system is working, but we have issues being addressed to stabilize it," Houston said. "So, at this point, I have no reason to believe that it will not be successful."

Sklar said the problems with PeopleSoft have been addressed and are currently being worked through with special training classes.

"Training was administered to get all faculty and staff up to speed on how to use the system," Sklar said. "Overall the training and transition to PeopleSoft has been very successful because it has eliminated many glitches associated with PeopleSoft."

During the summer there were three or four training sessions held that lasted a couple of hours to train faculty and staff on the financial side of PeopleSoft, said Colleen Zlomke, office supervisor of enrollment services.

"In the training sessions they walk you through the processes and give you binders as a help referral that are frequently updated with new information and sample practices and trials," Zlomke said. "In fact, we take a refresher course in October which will be ongoing by an internal source. As far as the financial aspect, I really like PeopleSoft."

Galveston Community College experimented with PeopleSoft and found the software to be very costly. The college spent nearly $800,000 to implement PeopleSoft and then went with a different software program.

"The final goal of the UH system in the next few years will be to have all of the four UH campuses up and running on PeopleSoft," Sklar said. "UH-Clear Lake's old software system was outdated in regard to equipment and software support. PeopleSoft, on the other hand, holds much promise for UH-Clear Lake's student services and processes."

"PeopleSoft is a great software system, but it appears to be more beneficial to larger campuses," said Joe Huff, communications officer at Galveston Community College.

Gracie Villarreal, senior business assistant for Health and Disability Services said she expected some problems with a new software system, the problems that came about were more than she expected.

One of the problems Villarreal has is getting exact account balances. Villarreal, and others working with the system, have to wait until certain times during the week or month to get complete balances.

Linda Walker, senior fiscal clerk, said PeopleSoft was first used in fall 2001 and has gotten better since spring 2002. "There are several steps to one little process and it is just time consuming," Walker said. "Lots of steps require you to fill in four or five fields in one channel before you can go to the next one. You can not go back and repeat a step if a student has already paid unless you know where to go. One good part of the system is that the students can go online and get a lot of information there. From our end of it, we have gotten faster, but it's still very difficult."

UH-Clear Lake will have to upgrade the software every three years in order to offer the most current services to its students.

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