[Business Affairs]

	UTSA Business Affairs Employee of the Quarter Recipients

2006 - 2007 2nd Quarter Recipient

Business Affairs is proud to recognize the first team recipient of the quarterly Celebrating Excellence Award. The Financial Affairs team consists of Ana Longoria, Cyndi Schweers, Mary Simon, Elizabeth Bay, Denise Brown.

After months of development and testing, the Management Reporting & Administrative Systems office implemented the new Business Intelligence Reporting Data System (BI-RDS).  Under the leadership of Mary Simon and Ana Longoria, the team’s first project was to automate the production of UTSA’s monthly income statement.  Previously it took approximately two weeks of manual effort each month to prepare the income statement.  Now that labor-intensive process has been converted to an automated process.

Ana Longoria, Director of Accounting Services, reports that this new automated process has eliminated the need for Accounting Department staff to work weekends to meet the reporting deadlines, and has saved two full days of preparation time.

Communication and collaboration among the two departments were key factors in the success of the project.  The team displayed excellent listening and overall oral communication skills so that the business process could be interpreted by persons who had never prepared a monthly financial statement at UTSA.  Their efforts resulted in the mapping and identification of data elements and mathematical functions to accomplish the automation.  The Management Reporting group now reconciles the data each month to match DEFINE output, assured the reports’ accuracy.  This partnership continues to be strong today as the staff of these two departments work closely to coordinate monthly financial results for external and internal reporting purposes.

The new reporting process required the creativity of the team to both design and trust a new way of doing business. Not only is this new data system providing creative solutions to processes, but it is promoting significant positive changes within Accounting.  The dedication of the team to work together on this project not only improved the monthly reporting of accounting results to the UT System, but laid the stepping stones to automate new reports to the entire university community.

This team’s communication skills, creativity and positive change were catalysts to the teams’ recognition and this quarter’s Celebrating Excellence recipients.  Congratulations to Ana, Cyndi, Mary, Elizabeth and Denise for all their hard work and dedication to continued process improvements!