December 1, 2023
In October, the FMM project team met on campus for a week-long on-site visit that included many in-person meetings as well as the FMM Walkabout, an interactive open house for campus financial system users. One deliverable and 31 milestones were completed in the past two months, including the finalization of test scenarios for the first cycle of System Integration Testing (SIT). SIT, beginning in January 2024, is the first segment of the project’s testing phase and will ensure that all of the individual components of the new system are properly integrated and communicating with each other.
In addition, the last configure & prototype sprint session was completed successfully in October, where the remaining user stories were demonstrated by module to ensure that specific campus use cases are met and that Oracle Financials Cloud (OFC) is configured accordingly. The Jaggaer (Gateway) Remediation subproject also began last month, supporting the retention of UCSB’s current procurement system, Gateway, while ensuring it operates effectively with the new OFC system. We also made major progress transforming and reconciling data in preparation for the first mock conversion, which will migrate fresh data into the testing environment for the first cycle of SIT.
Upcoming Events
FMM Town Hall - Quarterly Program Update: January 17 at 10 a.m. (via Zoom)
The FMM project team will host a virtual town hall in the new year to review our progress to date, share the new implementation timeline, provide an overview of the upcoming testing phase, and discuss planned training and engagement activities. Click here to register for the event.
Core Financial Principles Training: January 2024
Core Financial Principles (CFP) training is designed to provide knowledge of critical areas for those in a financial role on campus. UCSB’s new Office of Financial Training will roll out CFP training in two phases: Finance 101 and 201. Finance 101 courses will kick off in January 2024. More information and a schedule will be provided before the end of the calendar year.
Finance 201 will invite cohorts of business officers to attend a two-day summit for in-depth learning and discussions on a variety of topics that impact this role. We anticipate this phase of training will begin in April 2024.
Completed Events
FMM Walkabout - October 17
More than 250 UCSB employees attended the “FMM Walkabout: Financial Modernization in Motion” event in Corwin Pavilion on October 17. Guests were able to learn more about the upcoming FMM implementation while engaging with our experts to ask questions and provide feedback. If you would like to access visuals and materials shared during the event, you can find them on the FMM project website.
PGM Conversion Workshops - October 24 and October 30
For past workshop materials, visit the PGM Data Conversion page on the FMM website.
Workstream Updates
- Record-to-Report (RTR): The RTR team developed six Fixed Asset EFA (Equipment, Facilities, and Assets) reports for UCOP-level asset reporting: Equipment Addition, Equipment Transfer, Equipment Disposal, CAAN Addition, CAAN Transfer, and CAAN Disposal.
- Tax: The Tax team approved three specifications for the process of withholding tax reports on 1099, 1042, and 592 in OFC. This team is in the process of defining the Tax test scenarios and mapping them to user stories, which outline specific use cases for the Tax module in OFC.
- Risks & Controls (R&C): The Risks & Controls team completed demonstrations of OFC’s user provisioning functionality, reviewing and approving capabilities for department security administrators to evaluate user roles and access levels.
- Reporting: As of November 14, this team has finished developing 46 out of 51 custom OFC reports catered to UCSB’s business needs.
- Technical: The technical team made progress reviewing and approving 23 specification documents outlining the approach for configuring OFC reports and integrations. The team also kicked off the first round of mock data conversions in preparation for SIT 1, allowing us to identify any data migration issues and resolve them prior to testing.
- Conversion: The conversion team made progress converting existing UCSB data to the OFC development environment, including Billing Events, Receipts, Sponsored Projects, and Sponsored Awards. In addition, employee and bank/branches data were converted to the testing environment.
- Testing: The Testing team finalized the testing strategy for the SIT and User Acceptance Testing (UAT) cycles. The first round of SIT will start in January 2024.
Staying Engaged
Please encourage any staff members who may be impacted by FMM to enroll in the FMM mailing list so they can stay up-to-date on this upcoming transition.
Thank you for your continued support in modernizing our campus financial system.