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BROWN BAG MEETINGS

The Shared Services Center project is the subject of monthly brown bags, and the next one is scheduled for Monday, Feb. 27. During these meetings, which began last year, the Shared Services Implementation Team provides updates and answers questions.

All campus employees are welcome to attend, with no preregistration necessary (seating is on a first-come, first-serve basis).

Meetings take place from noon to 1 p.m. Here is the schedule through March:

• Monday, Feb. 27 — King Lounge,
• Monday, March 26 — Hamilton Room,

For ������Ƶ’ Shared Services Implementation Team, Valentine’s Day was sweeter than ever: The Shared Services Center went live that day, as announced by e-mail to some 6,000 employees in the administrative units that are using the center.

“The ������Ƶ Shared Services Center (SSC) is open for business! As of 6 a.m. today, the ServiceNow Case Management System began accepting service requests from administrative divisions for transactional work relative to finance, HR and payroll,” the e-mail stated.

The staff of 72 is working out of leased space at 202 Cousteau Place in Davis. An unspecified number of information technology jobs associated with help desk functions and desktop support will be added to the center toward May 1.

The Davis campus first heard official word of a “shared service center” in September 2009, during the second year of this most recent wave of big cuts in state funding.

Officials eventually estimated the project, as part of the campus’s initiative, would generate a savings of $25 million through 2015-16, after subtracting the start-up costs, followed by annual savings of $10 million thereafter.

“The SSC management team, in partnership with the case management system implementation team, has been working days and nights and weekends since mid-December to ensure we met the ‘go live’ goal,” said Lisa Terry, director, organizational development and communication for Organizational Excellence. “It was pretty amazing to see what they accomplished.”

The project has been in development for nearly 2½ years, and, for most of that time, the planners and Dateline ������Ƶ have been referring to the “shared service center” — with “service” singular.

But the center went live this week with a slightly different name: Shared Services Center — with “services” plural, in recognition of the center’s multiple services, among them the processing of accounts payable, purchasing and travel expense requests, changes in payroll information, salary action requests and recruitment requests.

Associate Vice Chancellor Karen Hull, who leads Human Resources and the shared services project, said: “This was a highly complex project and challenging transition that required the support and commitment of many employees across the campus. As an organization, we can be proud of what we have accomplished.

“On behalf of campus leadership, we extend many thanks to those of you who supported this important transition.”

Here are the units using the Shared Services Center: Administrative and Resource Management, Office of the Chancellor and Office of the Provost, Information and Educational Technology, Office of Research (vice chancellor’s office) and Student Affairs, plus Development and Alumni Relations and the other units comprised the former University Relations and External Relations. The ASUCD is scheduled to come on board June 30.

For now, departments have established process initiators and approvers, and, initially, they are the ones who are most likely to request service through the case management system, Terry said.

However, any employee who works for a unit served by the SSC has to the case management system and its associated knowledge base. Click here and then click on “Submit Service Request.” Once you enter your Kerberos login and password, you will arrive at the case management system home page.

Terry said computer-based training for the case management system is available for all staff through the campus's (search for “SSC ServiceNow” to reach the training program titled “SSC ServiceNow Service Catalog Navigation,” which offers a broad overview of the CMS.

More information is available . Or call the SSC service desk, (530) 754-4SSC (4772).

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