Peter Barone, Director of Finance Support Services
By the time he joined the TSS team, Peter Barone had spent 26 years at Tufts and had helped establish procurement processes such as the P-Card system, PeopleSoft, e-Expense and e-Reqs. For these and other accomplishments, Peter and his disbursements team were honored with a Tufts Distinction Award in 2012.
Who’s in your group and what do they do?
We’re made up of three groups: accounts payable, travel and procurement. The accounts payable group moved over to TSS with me, they’re the same people we had in place before TSS. The travel group is mostly new to Tufts and have a great deal of experience in travel-related activities. Staff and faculty who travel can use self-serve or they can come to us and we’ll make the arrangements and process the expenses for them. The procurement group is a mix of new staff and people who have been with Tufts since the days before TSS. This group assists users with their purchasing needs and, if needed, provides them access to our procurement systems (Marketplace, e-Req, P-card).
What kind of feedback are you getting and how are you responding to it?
People want confirmation when a process is complete, for instance when an invoice has been paid. The way it works now, someone sends something to us and we respond with an acknowledgement of the request. We have systems in place so people can pull information (about the status of a case) off the website.
Based on the feedback we’ve received, we’re looking at enhancing reporting to the community with Tableau reporting tools. Dick (Doolin) wants us to be as transparent as possible.
Is there anything you know now that you wish you’d known before going live?
In retrospect, we learned that there is a need to sync up PeopleSoft (Tufts’ system of record) to Salesforce. I think we all understand Salesforce a lot better now. We’ve been tweaking it constantly over the past year.
We didn’t realize that emails from TSS would go into people’s junk folders. Fixing that has been a case-by-case effort, telling people to make us a trusted site so messages about open cases don’t get rejected.
What are you working on now?
Dick, Pete (Barron) and I are looking at ways we can build a bridge between our systems (Salesforce and Apptricity) and PeopleSoft. We’re developing a dashboard that can extract data from these systems. “John Doe” will be able to see all of his cases or his travel reports, whether or not a report has been submitted — he’ll be able to see it all. We are testing this with a group of EADs and they are giving us their suggestions and feedback.
We are also working on confirmation emails that let people know the status of their case and what to expect. Other than that, we’re trying to establish an understanding that we are here and can help you. The community members who use us, use us repeatedly. We had a community member walk in with a Ziploc bag full of travel receipts and we were able to prepare the travel report. Experiences like this help us get to know the traveler and their habits so that going forward we can process their travel requests that much more efficiently.