Stabilization of the financial system continued over the six months after the migrated system went live. The agreement with Avanade (formerly Asysco) is complete and the final invoices are paid. A new annual support agreement with Astadia (formerly Anubex) is signed and in place. A scope of work was opened with Astadia to convert all remaining BPP data to a modern SQL database. BPP screen access shut down in preparation for this, and new BusinessObjects reports were created to fill the gaps. There are still occasional issues with daily operations, and a few issues are still open with Astadia, but most performance issues were solved.
Over the course of the replatforming project, FAMIS users have been asked to submit ideas for enhancement projects. Moving forward, the team plans to engage more fully with FAMIS / Canopy users to begin evaluating and developing both short-range and long-range plans for implementing new functionality and improving processes. More information on the Demand Management process will be forthcoming.
The Dev, Test, and Production FAMIS environments are available now, and the Training environment will be available in the summer of this year. The Staging environment will also be available in the future.
Invictus Gurus has been engaged for tool recommendations, such as Microsoft Bazor for new web applications and JSON REST as a standard for web services, to invest in technical debt reduction, improve business rule implementations and ensure alignment with reporting modernization tools. We have engaged Capsher to develop the planned FAMIS Transactions Upload web application. This will be a modern application design, architecture, and user interface and will support the uploading of financial transaction Excel files. Version 1 of the application, which is due this summer / fall, is at the proof-of-concept stage for code and architecture review. Version 2 will implement the new application in the Production environment. We also engaged Astadia to convert the remaining BPP data so that the mainframe can be shut down by June 30.
Other finance modernization projects include:
- Budget module enhancements to simplify budget pattern assignments, eliminate the possibility of lost data and orphaned accounts, and improve data warehouse feeds,
- Troy AssurePay check-writing software implementation,
- Discovery of Chrome River software as a potential Concur replacement,
- Transfer of the AggieBuy integration to the System Office infrastructure to stabilize and eliminate defects.
Slow but steady progress on the AFR project with EGP and OneStream continues. Once all FY 2022 reports are verified, FY 2023 data will be uploaded. Some challenges remain with the cash-flow statement and go-live is planned for late spring or summer of this year.
The project team is evaluating Snowflake as a cloud data platform, and modern data platform architecture best practices are being developed. Three reporting-tool dashboards, Tableau, Power BI, and MicroStrategy, are being considered. Security design continues to be reviewed, as does pipeline / integration tools and engineering. Evaluation of SAP Cloud Analytics, which currently supports BusinessObjects, has been completed. We are currently engaged with Accenture and Avanade to review Microsoft Azure for the data platform, Microsoft tools for pipelines and integrations, and Power BI for reporting.