Heard In The Corridor

ERP stands for Enterprise Resource Planning and, for CUNY and Baruch College, it means simpler information processing in Student Administration, Human Resources and Finance.

The CUNYfirst initiative, which I and many others at Baruch are helping bring to life, will replace aging legacy systems like SIMS, CUPS and E-Procurement and help us streamline and standardize many of the things we do. It’s a drop-down PeopleSoft™ system that will simplify the lives of all of us – faculty, staff and students. You will manage and interact with CUNYfirst via the internet. But, don’t worry: the old system will remain up until our new system stabilizes. And, since CUNY is carefully phasing each college into the system, Baruch will not be fully on line until 2011.

Every CUNY member will be trained on the systems that affect them. Train-the-Trainer meetings have already begun. Our campus will have a group of experts to help put the new processes through their paces. And, as the new software will be common across the university, you’ll learn from others who have found ways to make it work better and easier.

Right now, very few systems we use interact with each other. CUNYfirst will integrate all our financial, HR and student processes so that data can be instantly accessed across your department, the campus, and even the university. As faculty, you’ll instantly know pertinent educational data about your students, even if they transferred from another CUNY campus – that’s over 400,000 students at 23 campus locations!

Baruch College has other campus liaisons like me, such as Zicklin’s own Frank Fletcher and Fran Murphy. All decisions regarding new processes or procedures will be referred to us. For example, the General Ledger will convert two years of data. Human Resources will convert all historic employee data. And, for student systems, six years of information will be available live, with 24 years archived.

This all takes time. First Finance, Human Resources, Payroll and Academic structures will be input. Later, Purchasing, Accounts Payable and Expense, Benefits Administration, Student Admissions, and Financial Aid will be added. So the system will really take shape in 2012. The best thing about the new CUNYfirst system will be its self-service, allowing you to view portions of your HR records, including a listing of current chosen benefits and self-manage them. And you won’t have to log onto the CUNY portal. CUNYfirst will be hosted by servers in two offsite locations. So you can even log on in your PJ’s -- or not!

Still having problems digesting the new CUNYfirst system? Feel free to e-mail me jeffrey.danowitz@baruch.cuny.edu  or cunyfirst@mail.cuny.edu  or better yet, see for yourself at: http://first.cuny.edu .