September, 2015
From the Editor
My objectives in writing the BW Newsletter each month are twofold: (1) to share reporting news, and (2) to help each of you become more efficient in using BW reports. The second reason is the driver behind my frequent mentioning of upcoming training opportunities. What you may not realize, though, is that there are other opportunities beyond those listed in the online calendar. During the past year, for example, I have offered custom training sessions for a variety of departments and groups across the University, including SPH grant administrators, Questrom finance administrators, PAFO, SED, Sourcing & Procurement, and OSP, among others.
I’m happy to work with any department or group that would like to conduct an intermediate-level custom reporting training session. There are only two requirements for such a session: the group should include four or more employees, and all participants must have attended an intro-level BW training session in his/her functional area. If you’re interested in discussing the development of a custom session for your department or school/college, contact me via email or give me a call at 617-353-6382.
As always, I hope you find this issue of the Newsletter informative. Please let me know if you have any questions or comments.
Bill Stewart
The news this month involves work in progress that is being performed behind the scenes by the BW team. Although we have no announcements about new features this month, work continues on projects that will soon have an impact on everyone who uses Business Warehouse reports. Projects in the works include:
- The BW upgrade will be ready for go-live early next month. The most immediate effect will be a new look and feel for the reporting environment.
- In an effort to improve access to the myriad Business Warehouse Help Guides, the Document Library is being entirely reorganized. You can sneak a peek at the changes by visiting the Library at www.bu.edu/tech/support/buworks/help/bw/. We expect the new site to be available early in November.
- The Supplier Relationship Management Project will be completed by the end of this year and will affect anyone who uses SRM reports. Changes you can expect include enhanced reporting capabilities and a significantly slimmer list of reports in the Distributed folder.
- The Integrated Planning (IP) functionality effort involves Budget Office data processing and reporting. The project is ongoing.
Some of these Tips may be new to you, while others may be familiar. Regardless, we hope you find value in these and future Tips, even if we do no more than remind you of the existence of tools you once knew about but had since forgotten.
Note: all of the Tips posted in BW newsletters are archived on this page.
Create a Directory for your Department or School/College
It’s the start of a new semester. What better time to create a directory for your organization? The Faculty and Staff Directory report, available to managers and payroll coordinators, allows you to do just that. The report is chock full of useful data, including employee name, office address and phone number, as well as manager name and email address. Furthermore, two Organization Unit levels are available, so you can build an organizational view of your department or school/college in roster format.
An important feature of the report is that it is not limited by the permissions of the person running the report. Thus, if you can run the report, you can view the organizational assignment of any member of the faculty or staff across the University. As a result, using the report is a great way to look someone up in another department.
By the way, this is just one of several useful reports in the Employee Data (Distributed) folder, each of which is based on the HCM Employee Model. To learn more about the model and associated reports, visit the Employee Model project web page, which includes an Employee Model User’s Guide.
Returning to the Faculty and Staff Directory report, here is an example of a roster-based org chart you might build for your organization:
Click to enlarge image
To see the steps involved in building a roster like this, review this Help guide: BW How to – Build an Org Unit-based Departmental Directory.
September Training Opportunities
Introductory Workshops offered this month
As always, an assortment of introductory workshops will be offered this month. These sessions present to new employees – or employees assigned a new business role – the fundamentals of reporting for a particular subject area. The sessions are a great way to review material, too. Even if you previously attended an intro session, you are likely to learn new things about reporting – or to be reminded of concepts that you had forgotten.
Click on any of the following links for a course description and/or to register for an upcoming session:
Supplier Resource Management Reporting
Labor Distribution (Payroll) Reporting
Intermediate-level Workshops offered this month
As mentioned in the Editor’s Note, these intermediate-level reporting sessions have been scheduled later this month:
Please visit this page to view a schedule of all upcoming BW sessions. If you don’t see a date or a location scheduled for the course you want to attend, send email to Bill and let him know of your interest.
No Longer Interested in the Newsletter?
You can unsubscribe from the Newsletter email list by visiting this page.