From: "Padilla Jr, Ramon" Date: Friday, August 13, 2021 at 11:56 AM To: "Gross, Louis J" Cc: "Miller, David Leslie" , "Lemon, Tammy" , "Sisto Means, Natalie" , "joshua.d.sandstrom@accenture.com" , "Martin, Linda C (Linda C. Martin)" Subject: RE: ACTION NEEDED: Review Post-Session Notes for Future State Process - UFC Dr. Gross, First and foremost, thank you for your feedback. Your questions are timely and insightful. While I did not attend the session for which you are giving feedback, I believe I can help provide some context for the answers that were provided to you and your colleagues during the session. As I am sure that our partners at Accenture pointed out, the major vendors in the ERP space are still working on their products, particularly when it comes to student and research. HR and Finance are the most mature products in the ERP stack as of now. Additionally, because they are cloud products, solutions are changing rapidly to meet the demands of their customer base. Lastly, because we are about to begin the RFP process, it is hard to give definitive answers to questions when we do not know what the chosen product will be. Thus, the answers given may have been a little “squishy” at times, but the team was answering to the best of their ability. Much of what they could say is “it depends.” That said, I can give some definite answers. Interoperability will not be an issue with any vendor we choose. We are confident that we will be able to move data between our satellite systems and the new ERP at least as well if not better than we do today with IRIS. I can say this because we know that the new ERP will have a rich set of application interfaces (APIs) AND we are working on middleware software that we are calling an “integration hub” specifically so we will have the ability to integrate satellite products now and in the future. During product evaluation, we will learn each ERP vendor’s capabilities and whether the modules they offer are competitive feature wise with our satellite systems. IRIS has quite a number of integrations to these stand-alone systems, and we will evaluate them as part of the process. Campus and Institute stakeholders identified over 300 experts systemwide to participate in the business process review sessions. These groups are critical to the project and will be engaged in all future phases – they will provide input on product selection and configuration design decisions in their areas of expertise. We are working hard to expand the teams – i.e. adding faculty for the grant management and research administration functions - so that all stakeholders and experts have the opportunity to give input in their respective areas. Sincerely, Ramon Padilla Jr. Ramon Padilla Jr. Chief Information Officer UT Department of Technology Solutions (DTS) From: "Gross, Louis J" Date: Tuesday, August 17, 2021 at 6:11 PM To: "Padilla Jr, Ramon" Cc: "Miller, David Leslie" , "Lemon, Tammy" , "Sisto Means, Natalie" , "Sandstrom, Joshua D." , "Martin, Linda C (Linda C. Martin)" , "Gross, Louis J" , "Walker, Sean C" Subject: Re: ACTION NEEDED: Review Post-Session Notes for Future State Process - UFC CIO Padillo, Thank you for your response to the concerns I raised following the meeting of the University Faculty Council with Ms. Lemon and the Accenture contractors. My comments arise from having lived through, and regularly provided input for, the extensive challenges of the transition to the IRIS system many years ago. It serves the UT System to ensure this new transition takes into account all the stakeholders and as was indicated in our meeting, it is clear that the faculty voice had not been heard previously. I do encourage you to, as you note, ensure that PIs are directly involved in the system development involving proposals and award management. Regarding interoperability with systems, you mention that the system will work at least as well as our current systems. Frankly our current systems have major problems. I regularly hear complaints from our campus administrators about some of these - even basic information such as how many faculty we have is not readily available or consistent across the variety of datasets here. I will give a specific example that I deal with regularly regarding interaction between the finance, payroll and proposal management systems. UT policy doesn't allow a "standard" fringe rate to be applied when a proposal budget is developed that includes current employees. It must have the current fringe rates for employees. However these fringe rates can vary from month to month for any individual, and there is no consistent way to obtain the "correct fringe rate" when I develop a new proposal budget. This means I make regular budget revisions to meet whatever IRIS claims the current fringe rate is after the pre-award staff inform me what the rate is that they see. True interoperability between systems would automatically populate a new proposal with the correct fringe rate for an employee which is not what happens now and I can't see how this will be feasible from simple data-passing through an API - it requires true integration and a set of rules about averaging fringe rates over time perhaps. On a similar point, the budget categories in the proposal management system generally don't align with those in the agencies, which means I spend time trying to align a G/L budget with the categories in a proposal. As another example, I served for six years on the UT System Federal Compliance Task Force. Among the issues we never were able to solve, in part because of the software limitations, is the lack of a method to charge an award each month for the leave time that is accumulated by employees. Leave each month is charged to whatever accounts the employee is on that month and an employee that moves positions takes their accumulated leave with them which causes hosts of problems for the PIs of the projects they move to. At the end of an award, leave accumulation is paid out to an employee who leaves service and this must be paid for by other funds from the unit. Just last year, the Institute I directed had to pay out over $60K in final leave payments to terminated staff from UT funds we luckily had available. Any new ERP should have a mechanism available to deal with leave accumulation and final payouts that is compliant with federal guidelines and avoids the issues of the current system. This aligns with my concern expressed to David Miller two years ago that software should not drive policy. Stay well, Lou -- Louis J. Gross (he, him, his) Chancellor’s Professor and Alvin and Sally Beaman Distinguished Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and Mathematics Director Emeritus, National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis (NIMBioS.org) Director, The Institute for Environmental Modeling University of Tennessee - Knoxville President, 2006-2007, 2021-2022, UTK Faculty Senate Past-President, 2003-2005, Society for Mathematical Biology http://lgross.utk.edu/