What a Great Feeling!
While most people enjoyed their long Labor Day weekend relaxing – perhaps down the shore (Point Pleasant Beach used to be my favorite) or at a barbeque with friends this one for me was one full of excitement yet also filled with tons of butterflies in my stomach. Why? Our Electronic Report of Personnel Actions (eRPA) was going live on Monday, September 21st and I needed to move all of the programs, Crystal Reports, setup security and populate all of the new cdtables into our production environment.
Over the past few months the screens have gone through a bit of a transformation with more check boxes added and less drop down boxes on the first two tabs. In addition more error checking was added to ensure the highest quality of accuracy. Links to our intranet were added to the first tab for pay periods (start/end dates and pay dates) and for employee management. But perhaps the biggest change (and challenge) that was made was to come up with some type of workflow where the actual screens were ‘passed’ from manager to director to HR or vice versa. And once the eRPA was sent to the next level for approval it should be locked so that no changes could be made except by the manager whose queue it was in. This was accomplished thru security settings, emails being sent out via a stored procedure and the building of teams. A new mandatory drop down box was added called ‘Forward To’. This contained a drop down box of all the teams that were built. These teams consisted of the managers/supervisors and Chief Officers of all of the departments within the Clerk’s office that had the authority to create/approve an eRPA. However, HR requested that whoever was doing the eRPA should only be able to see the teams consisting of their supervisor and themselves. Plus HR should only appear in the drop down box for the Chief Officers. Ok more waking up at 3 am with the answer to this request but after some trial and error and talking to myself it was working as requested. Once the ‘ok’ button was selected the stored procedure took over and sent out an email to anyone who belonged to the team that was selected in the ‘Forward To’ box indicating that they had an eRPA waiting for their approval in Vista. The logic behind this is located in the edit.vb program that checks to see if the logged in PDS userid of the employee attempting to edit the eRPA was in the ‘team’ selected in the ‘Forward To’ box. If they were then that employee could access and edit the eRPA. However if they were not then an error screen was displayed indicating that the eRPA was locked by the manger/payroll/HR/CO. Finally once the eRPA was totally approved it would end up in payroll’s queue. If approved by payroll, a Crystal Report would execute that would produce a one page PDF file of the eRPA that would be emailed to payroll, HR and the supervisor (More sleepless nights figuring this one out). Payroll would then scan the ‘Approved Version’ into our document imaging system where it will remain for 50 years from the date of retirement per Florida Statue.
We also created two additional Crystal Reports which were placed in HR->Reports->Manager Self Service for easy access by our managers. These reports were ‘Clerk Outstanding eRPAs’ (to allow the managers to see where in the process the eRPA was) and ‘Clerk eRPA Report (Unofficial Version)’ (a one page pdf of the eRPA as it looked at that point in time).
Once we had the screens and logic set up the way we thought would work the best for the users, HR invited some of our managers who are our ‘power users’ to try it out in our test environment. There were a couple of tweaks that came out of this important session but the best part was hearing how much they loved everything about the eRPA with comments like ‘It seems too easy’ and ‘Can I have it now?’. Then the week before go-live HR held training sessions for the managers who were also able to log into our test environment and create eRPAs.
The overall design was created so that once we were live changes could be done by HR with little or no intervention by TSD. Some of these include; maintenance of the new cdtable which controls three different select boxes and modifying the teams including adding/deleting of team members.
Then the morning of Monday, September 21st came and by 9:00 the first eRPA was in the system. Of course I watched it every day to see where it was in the flow – patiently waiting for it to get to payroll. And then on the morning of Wednesday, September 30th it happened – it made its way from manager to CO to HR and then to payroll where they gave their final approval and Crystal Reports produced the ‘Final Version’ of the eRPA and it was emailed to the correct employees and made its way into our document imaging system. Of course I called our payroll manager saying ‘It made it!’ What a terrific feeling of happiness and relief.
Now that we are several months into production (and several hundred eRPAs have been processed) there have been some minor cosmetic changes – change the font and bold the person_id and pay grades on the final Crystal report, add effective date and eRPA type to the email that goes to payroll only – but the overall design and process has worked perfectly. The old saying of ‘test, test and test again’ really paid off for us! The overall success of this project would not have been possible had it not been for the great team work that our project team had. Credit goes out to Marcia our project manager for being able to bounce ideas off of each other, Terry our DBA for all the times I came to her and said ‘I need to change the table again!’, Brenda our payroll manager and Karen and Sara in HR for the design, testing and their terrific ideas, Chris for his great documentation, Jillian for changing our document imaging system for the new queues and doc types and Ellen our manager for her support.
I am thrilled that this process is now up and running in production! So you think I can now sleep through the night – of course not as now I am in the process of creating a similar procedure for New Hires using the pending tables and the new ‘Pending Employees’ screens. And before you know it the conference in Tampa will be here and HR/Payroll will surely come back with new ideas – so I am letting them know now that their pens (or Microsoft Surface tablets) will be confiscated!
Barbara Cobb
Lee County Clerk Of Circuit Court
Senior Application Administrator
Technology Services Department
BCobb@leeclerk.org