Over the past few years, S&T’s College of Engineering and Computing (CEC) continually faced issues with human resources and fiscal processes. Across the academic departments, staff struggled to complete time-consuming processes and often had to split duties among a wide range of unrelated functions. CEC leadership decided to coordinate human resource and fiscal processes across the college to make them more focused and efficient. To support the CEC academic departments, the service center consists of two parts: the fiscal service center that provides support for financial processes and the business service center that provides support with human resource needs. There is much to share about their impact on the college.

The fiscal service center has improved access to financial data for faculty by creating specialized links to check account balances, reducing processing time on tuition waivers and expense approvals, improving communication about cost share on grants, and collaborating with the office of sponsored programs to create a direct link to the EVRs. The team plans to send a progress report to CEC faculty and staff for feedback on how the fiscal service center can further assist in fiscal processes.

The business service center improved efficiency on the faculty/staff hiring process by creating a Google form to initiate hiring in CEC. The business service center also supported the college by processing reappointments of lecturers and adjuncts, processing courtesy and volunteer appointments, providing oversight to monthly appointments to avoid overpayments, reviewing payroll activities, and preparing documentation for international academic appointments. Beginning this summer, the business service center will complete all summer salary requests for nine-month faculty.

Thanks to the CEC service center team members and their work to create new processes to support the organization, the service centers made outstanding progress in a short time. Defining issues and creating solutions helps the college and the academic departments run more smoothly during day-to-day operations.