January 18, 2008

Financial Aid ready for OnePurdue's new Banner system

The third OnePurdue release overall, this will be the first of two Banner modules that will go into production before the fall semester. (SunGard Higher Education's Banner software is the suite of applications that will comprise the bulk of the new student systems. Already in use at Fort Wayne and Calumet, it is being implemented at the West Lafayette and Purdue North Central campuses.)

"Mock" testing of the new financial aid system has been under way since last fall. The initial round of this, Mock 1, was completed Nov. 9. Mock 2 began Nov. 26 and continued into January. Some additional testing, known as Mock 2.1, is still under way, and must be completed by the February release.

DFA staff members have been involved with this for several months, and as many as 15 of them have been working on it full-time at OnePurdue since November, said Bonnie Joerschke, senior associate director of DFA. In addition to helping with all the testing, they were the first in the department to be trained to use both the Banner financial aid software and Cognos, the new reporting tool that will work with it.

Although Banner Financial Aid will be used by DFA after the February go-live date, most people outside of the department may not notice significant changes.

"Our goal is to make the transition to the Banner system seamless, so that students and staff will hardly notice any changes in financial aid processes," Joerschke said.

DFA staff will work to make the transition to Banner through spring and into summer, so some of its features will be rolled out over time. One of its benefits, however, will be helpful immediately.

"For the first time, we will have an integrated system, which means we won't have to keep looking up information in multiple legacy systems," Joerschke said.

DFA Executive Director Joyce Hall agrees. "With the current system, we often have to look up data in as many as three or four different systems on campus, and all of them operate under different codes. But having a single source of information will allow us to do our work -- and assist students -- much more quickly and efficiently."

One Banner feature will be available to students as early as April: the ability to accept or reject financial aid offers (for the fall semester) online, said DFA Associate Director Marvin Smith. "This should be an intuitive process for students and improve some financial aid processes for us."

The new financial aid system will eventually bring other improvements down the road, including imaging (having access to electronic images of paper documents), easier data entry of tax returns, and more frequent batch processing.

From Jan. 23 to Feb. 7, all remaining DFA staff, including student employees, will be attending two-day Banner Financial Aid training sessions, Joyce Hall, executive director, said.

"All 52 of us will be trained just before the new software is released, so we'll be able to hit the ground running," she said.

North Central financial aid personnel will receive training on their campus.

About eight DFA employees and four PNC staff will receive Cognos training as well. There will be more training over the summer as other processes are implemented.

"This is an exciting time for us," Hall said. "We are about to change every process we do in this office, but we're ready."

Smith said that DFA is up to the challenge. "We deal with changes in student aid programs all the time, so our staff is good at dealing with change."

OnePurdue: http://www.purdue.edu/onepurdue