MONTHLY REPORT -- September-December, 2000
Highlights of September-December, 2000
Catching up on our activities:
In September, our accounting unit got the first of the new ARMS produced reports. There were a number of irregularities for Ellen Scherer and Jean McMeans to deal with and report to Accounts Payable. Three reports now provide the information formerly in one, but it is more detailed, so the pros and cons balance somewhat. Ellen and Sheryl attended workshops on interpreting the new reports.
In association with MOD and SER heads, Ellen established a monthly list of invoice problems referred to the order staff in each of those depts. These lists, shared with MOD and SER, will help all of us track resolution of these invoices.
With the departure of Roger Stockdale and Karen Carroll, there was an opportunity to look at streamlining the handling of procurement card (credit card) statements for book purchases. Linda Gonzalez agreed the routing of the statements through Monograph and TSAA depts provided enough audit checks that we no longer need to pass the information by the Business Office. In December, Linda G and Brent Fuhrman resolved our question about ARMS workflow access for Ellen Scherer.
The serial dealer change from Faxon to Ebsco included accounting issues that Ellen and I worked on with SER folks. More postings were needed at times to manage the size of the transaction file. Deb helped by emptying the e-price field in thousands of 3-funded orders. Our efforts to expend the prepayment to Ebsco had to wait till the order records were built in late December.
Ellen worked with Mike Grimes on a new activity for her, downloading and processing electronic invoices. Although it is time consuming in some ways, it's overall effect is greater efficiency over the year.
The move of OSU's Accounts Payable Dept from Lincoln Tower to Blankenship Hall during fall quarter has made our pickup and delivery of checks, invoice batches, paid voucher reports and General Ledger reports very cumbersome. We had been able to walk to Lincoln or send students on these trips. Now we have to take a bus, borrow the libraries' van (sometimes unavailable) or drive our personal cars to handle this work. We have stopped using our students for this activity as it takes 50 minutes by campus bus round trip and at least 30 minutes by van or car. Jean McMeans and Ellen occasionally use their own cars to pick up or drop off material at AP on their way to or from work.
Our 50% accounting person, Sindy Chan, graduated in December, actually leaving us early in the month. She was a great help in our initial take on of serial accounting work last April, since she had worked in TSAA as a student accounting employee for 3 years. We hired Linda Talmadge to replace Sindy and she started the week after Christmas. Ellen is very pleased with her progress.
The NT reghosting caused numerous difficulties with specific programming not working with the new software. Deb was the mainstay in getting our 90+ PCs updated with all the particular software packages they needed. Deb, Lisa and Janie assisted TS staff as needed regarding new elements of the software. Problems assumed to be related to bandwidth caused frequent downtimes for individuals and areas. Also during the quarter remaining low-end PCs were swapped out of TS depts, all work Deb handled with IT folks.
The IT dept staffing shortage in late December brought a request for assistance from TSAA's Deb Cameron to help respond to libmicro requests. MOD graciously agreed to take over some order and claim printing while Deb devotes some of her time to helping IT respond to problems from all the OSUL libraries.
The fall quarter influx of new student employees in the TS depts meant a lot of one on one training sessions for Deb and Lisa to conduct, covering PC accounts, Eudora, Felix, wordprocessing, file sharing, etc.
Lisa Iacobellis led 'I am a book' tours during the quarter and is working in the TS group working on another tour, "I am an electronic resource".
Lisa and Janie have created and added numerous documents to the TS web site. Examples include: serial checkin procedures, a Eudora crib sheet, developed a web site menu for Collections Advisiory Council and prepared T Connell's CORC Power Point presentation for the web. In addition, Lisa helped MOD finalize their dept web page design and make the live link to the TS site.
The quarter break brought the usual shortage of students to manage the serial mailflow, but TSAA also had some staff absent. Janie McIntyre and I spent a lot of hours in late December opening packages, sorting materials and preparing checkin mail for distribution.
As I write this, Mary Stiffler, who many know from her phone reception work for TS depts, is leaving TSAA for a promotion in Serials/Electronic Resources. We wish her good luck.
And these are just the tips of many icebergs, aka TSAA staff workdays. At the same time as these highlights were occurring, invoices were getting paid regularly, order problems solved, ledgers and fund reports updated, phones answered, supplies maintained, workshops given, documents produced, PC and software problems resolved and a myriad of other details. A lot of good work by a few good people...