Descriptions of Rollout98 Components

Table of Contents

Budget Discovery Process
Costing Sheets
Data Warehouse
Departmental Budget Planning
Electronic Journal Vouchers
Enhanced ECAT/NECX
Executive Information System
Internal Provider Billing
Labor Distribution System
Legacy Systems Conversion/Decommissioning
Manual Reservations
Physical Plant Project
Release Strategies
Requisitioning
Reporting (Extended ZMIT)
Roles Database
SAP 4.5 Upgrade Planning
SAPWeb
VIP Credit Card
Workflow
 

Budget Discovery Process

This project will investigate alternatives for the future budgeting process. The final product selected will have the following primary components:
  1. A decentralized process for budget creation and submission. A common package will be used by departments, labs, and centers (DLC's) to create budget scenarios and analysis, and then submit the DLC budget to the Budget Office.
  2. Centralized receipt of budgets and administration of budget to actuals. Budget data will be available in SAP.
  3. Management of budget authorizations and requests for budget changes. This functionality fulfills the need for managing the budget revision process that takes place continuously throughout the fiscal year. Currently requests for budget changes originate with the department or School, and are reviewed and implemented centrally by the Budget Office.
As an outcome of 1 - 3, the MITbud and BEERS systems will be retired.

Costing Sheets

Costing sheets allow for the central application of laboratory allocation costs, employee benefits, and indirect costs. They use bases of varying groups of cost elements with defined percentages, the application of which varies with the type of cost object and its on/off campus status.

Data Warehouse

The MIT Data Warehouse provides access to SAP financial information and other MIT systems for reporting. SAP data available to authorized users includes detailed transaction data from July 1996 to present, as well as related "master data." Some basic (Brio Query) reports will be delivered as part of the rollout. Requests for "canned reports" will be dealt with on a case-by-case basis.

Departmental Budget Planning

Beginning with Milestone 2, MIT will start to use SAP's expense and revenue planning capability in a limited fashion. The budget plan maintained by the Office of Budget & Financial Planning (OBFP) and the research project authorized totals maintained by the Office of Sponsored Programs (OSP), will be copied on a regular basis into SAP. In addition to this official plan, departments, labs, and centers will have an SAP "plan version" available for their own purposes, in which authorized users can enter line item values. This working plan could be used, for example, to break out an authorized total for a research project into several expense line items, or to keep an alternative projection to the annual general budget.

Once entered into SAP, plan values can be displayed on standard reports. Users could compare actual expenditures against the official Institute plan or  their own working plan. Users will not be allowed to submit or change the official Institute plan in SAP. The present Five Year Plan submission procedure will continue, and changes to the official plan must still be handled through OBFP or OSP.

Enhanced ECAT/NECX

"Enhanced ECAT" --  also known as " ECAT2" --  is a replacement for ECAT. ECAT2 will upgrade the technology and streamline the business processes upon which ECAT is built.

MIT has identified NECX as its vendor partner for computer-related purchases. This relationship constitutes a major step in transforming the MIT Computer Center resale operation into an electronic commerce model. This effort represents the first application of the ECAT2 model in a vendor partnership.

The complete ECAT2 model for NECX will work as follows: a departmental user will browse NECX's online catalog and place items he/she wishes to order in a virtual shopping basket. Once the user has finished browsing, he/she may submit the order, which will convert the shopping basket information into a SAPweb requisition, where the user may enter or select accounting detail. Once the requisition is submitted, an SAP requisition is created and approved by authorized approvers in SAP. A purchase order is created and transmitted to NECX electronically. NECX fills the order and ships directly to the user's desktop. NECX issues an invoice and transmits it electronically to MIT.

 Executive Information System

Reports using SAP's Executive Information System (EIS) will available to users authorized by their departments. EIS can be thought of as a collection of multi-dimensional dedicated databases called "information cubes." EIS databases can be designed to cover any kind of financial management reporting in SAP. Individual EIS databases, known as "aspects," collect information from various SAP sources, with the aim of presenting managers with a reporting view of a group; a department, lab or center; a School; or the entire Institute.

Electronic Journal Vouchers

Users will enter journal vouchers directly into SAP. Paper and $SumMIT journal vouchers are no longer accepted.

Internal Provider Billing

A mechanism will allow internal providers to load their billing files into SAP as a journal voucher from spreadsheets generated by their own systems. This functionality is currently available in $Summit.

Labor Distribution System

The Labor Distribution System (LDS) provides a consistent tool for MIT departments, labs, and centers to analyze and manage labor and related effort costs.

Authorized LDS users can:

Commitments created in LDS for salary, vacation, and change in hours are calculated and posted to SAP cost objects and cost elements right away, at the total cost element level. Commitments also include benefits (EB), Overhead (OH), and lab allocations.

Legacy Systems Conversion/Decommissioning

Most of the classic MIT accounting systems will be decommissioned. For those systems that are to be decommissioned, the target is to stop maintaining current data effective Dec. 31, 1998. After Jan. 1, 1999, some of the classic systems may still be used to provide access to historical data. Since the MIT classic systems are the source of most feeds to DLC "departmental systems," it is necessary to plan how to operate in the absence of the feeds from those classic systems. In the future, the source for this information needed by departments will be the MIT Data Warehouse.

Manual Reservations

Manual reservations are transactions used to make commitments for costs such as internal charges and salaries. Manual reservations are used to create primary cost commitments against a budget for any expenditure that cannot be committed through requisitions or purchase orders. Secondary costs are charged on the primary costs through the periodic overhead process. Funds are reserved on the date the charge is expected (due on date) and are deducted from the available budget as of that date. Funds reservations may be liquidated at any time, at the discretion of the user, but must be liquidated after actual charges have been posted. Anticipated credits can be entered as negative commitments.
Note: Manual reservations cannot yet be automatically liquidated after actual charges have been posted.

Physical Plant Project

The project is focused on implementing the Physical Plant functions of budgeting, cost collection, cost distribution, and cost reporting onto SAP for the purposes of cost allocation and recovery.

Release Strategies

A release strategy is the means by which requisitions will be approved in SAP. Once all the required releases have been made, a purchase order can be created.

Reporting ("Extended ZMIT")

Enhanced reporting will be available to the MIT community via the "zMIT" menu in SAP. The following new or updated reports are available to authorized users: Additionally, a new program in the standard MIT "Accounting" menu called "Convert Legacy Architecture" will translate legacy account numbers and object codes to SAP cost objects and cost elements.

Requisitioning

SAP requisitions are internal MIT documents that identifying materials or services that need to be procured for MIT customers. The SAP requisition authorizes the Purchasing Department to procure specified quantities of materials within desired delivery dates at the most favorable pricing.

Users can either enter SAP requisitions directly using the SAP GUI, or they can utilize the MIT-developed SAPweb front end to SAP. Users will identify quantities, descriptions, cost object(s), general ledger accounts, desired vendor, and free text on their requisitions. Once the requisition is saved, SAP will electronically route the requisition through its associated approval process by criteria defined in the SAP release strategy. Once a requisition has fulfilled all its approval requirements for each line item, the requisition will be ready for processing by the Purchasing Department.

Roles Database

The Roles Database will be used to store and maintain roles/authorization/access information for SAP and other computer-based systems at MIT. It allows for decentralization of the maintenance of this data.

SAP 4.5 Upgrade Planning

The purposes of this project is to upgrade all of our SAP R/3 environments to release 4.5 without adversely impacting day-to-day operations. This upgrade will occur after the conclusion of the current Rollout98 effort.

SAPWeb

SAPWeb allows users to execute selected SAP transactions through Web browsers rather than using the SAP software. Currently supported transactions include:

VIP Credit Card

The VIP Card is a new purchasing tool developed for the MIT community with the intent of streamlining the buy-pay process for small dollar purchases. There will be two separate functions associated with the card:

Workflow

Workflow routes requisition line items which require approval to the appropriate people based on a combination of requisition line item fields. The workflow uses the  chosen release strategy and an SAP function module that determines the funds center(s) for the requisition line item. This data is compared to a PD-Org structure to determine the appropriate notification agent. This agent receives a work item in their workflow inbox. This work item provides an automatic link to the approval transaction, allowing users to approve, reject or cancel approvals for a line item.