Using hats to illustrate the many different people involved in purchasing University equipment, Marianne Osberg demonstrated the first simulation of the SIUC Oracle computer system Monday to about 250 future users.

There are four different players in this demonstration:a secretary, a fiscal officer, a new faculty member and a buyer, she said.

Osberg, a senior buyer in purchasing, walked the audience through the purchasing process and online paperwork involved in the new Oracle system step-by-step.

Advertisement

She traced the process starting with the new faculty member who wanted to purchase a computer and ending with the buyer purchasing the computer. The system will not be totally online at SIUC for at least another year.

After 20 years of waiting and waiting we will finally have automatic purchasing, she said.

The Oracle computer system, designed to streamline administrative tasks and alleviate the paperwork burden of SIUC financial officers, promises to make financial, payroll and human resources’ administrative tasks more efficient.

Months of identifying existing system problems and seeking input to build SIU’s computer system led up to Monday’s demonstration.

We have looked very deeply across all three campuses to see how SIU does its business, said Gary Giacomelli, the SIU in Springfield assistant dean for institutional planning. And then we looked at how the University wants to proceed in business in the future.

This system will do a better job of supplying the information to you that you need to manage your department or unit better.

The project, which began in January last year, includes Carbondale, Edwardsville and the School of Medicine in Springfield, and the cost of the project is being split three ways. Charles Hardenburg, Oracle project coordinator, is uncertain of the exact cost to date, but said the cost will be around the previously estimated $13.5 million.

Advertisement*

In any project you go through various revisions of budget, but there haven’t been any unexpected costs at this point, Hardenburg said.

The University decided to engage in the project in part because the year 2000 can cause errors in many computer systems. Many computers, especially old mainframes, will compute the date as 1900 after Dec. 31 1999, making simple computations involving dates inaccurate.

Many of ours systems are wheezing under the strain of age, Giacomelli said.

Giacomelli said SIU Oracle project staff are now developing a transition team to design solutions to SIU’s current administrative computing problems and work to include them in the new system.

Hardenburg said about 200 people are working on the project, but that the most of them are not full time.

This is an enormous amount of work, and a lot of folks have put in a lot of hours in addition to their full-time jobs, he said.

Throughout the presentation, Giacomelli and Osberg invited the audience to ask questions. One such question was how a server failure would affect Oracle software users.

The server by design will not go down, Hardenburg responded, which prompted the audience to laugh. And you can take that to the bank.

Hardenburg then said that such a failure would impair local use of Oracle software.

The University purchased a server and other hardware from Sun Microsystems Inc. Hardenburg estimated the cost of the equipment at a little more than $2 million.

Hardenburg said that server is state of the art and likely will not have any problems. He said any problems that do occur will easily be repaired.

Hardenburg said the project’s completion date is unset but that it will be completed by the fiscal year 2000 deadline.

I don’t see anything that would prevent us from meeting that date, he said. We obviously are hitting some unknowns, but they are getting fewer as we come along and the product is maturing every day.

Osberg stressed that for the project to mature properly, however, everyone must share what they want the computer system to incorporate.

We all have much to do to ensure the successful implementation of this project, she said.

Larry Schilling, project coordinator for Institutional Research who attended the demonstration, said he looks forward to using Oracle, but that training users will take time.

The present system is exceedingly complicated right now, he said. So this can’t be much worse.

They just have to get by that initial learning curve of training people to use the system.