JOG Report

May 12, 1999

Financial Management System (FMS):

The new PeopleSoft General Ledger and Project Costing applications have now been in production for more than one-and a half years and continue to provide expanded benefits such as more-frequent and shorter closes and expanded reporting capabilities. PeopleSoft recently delayed the June 30 availability of the Government Version 7.5 of their applications until September 30. This is one year after the 7.5 Commercial Version release. In hindsight, use of the Commercial Version would have been preferable from the start of the project.

HR/Payroll System:

The upgrade to Version 7.5 of these applications was placed in production during April. This is the third major upgrade release we have implemented for these systems and the first that we performed without using the services of the PeopleSoft Upgrade Laboratory.

Budget System:

The four finalists who responded to our Budget System have all fallen short of meeting our requirements. The two leading vendors were asked to demonstrate eight specific budget formulation and reporting capabilities, but both performed poorly. As a result we are now undertaking the in-house development of a prototype budget system integrated with the PeopleSoft financial systems to demonstrate the feasibility of this approach. We expect to have a prototype available for user testing by the end of the year.

Scientific Computing:

The Lab has selected an IBM RS/6000 SP as its next generation supercomputer. The installation will begin in June, 1999 and when Phase II is completed by December, 2000 the system will have 2,048 processors with peak processing power of more than 3 teraflops. This is four to five times the capacity of the Lab's current seven supercomputers which currently comprise the largest unclassified computer center in the U.S. The cost of the new system will be $33 million. Negotiations are underway for the acquisition of up to 60,000 square feet of space to house existing and new computer equipment.

 Procurement:

A new EDI arrangement has been established with GC Micro to provide computer supplies. As a result of this and similar EDI arrangements along with the use of purchasing cards the number of Purchase Orders issued by the Lab has decreased dramatically from more than 40,000/year in 1995 to a current rate of about 10,000/year. For some time all of Lab's PO's have been handled through the Oracle Purchasing system which was recently upgraded to version 10.7 to achieve Y2K compatibility. This upgrade was done with assistance from Oracle Consulting Services, who exceeded their man hour estimate by 100%. This experience has again demonstrated the difficulty of Oracle application upgrades. There is a high level of user acceptance of this system, but in view of the decreasing role of PO's and the need for increased integration with PeopleSoft, it is likely that this system will be replaced before another upgrade becomes necessary.

Web Infrastructure:

A customized version of Netscape Communicator 4.51 was made available to the Lab's IMAP4 and calendaring users several weeks ago and, so far, more than 2,300 have preformed the upgrade with minimal difficulty. This new version provides a number of functional enhancements such as improved addressing capability as well as faster performance.

A web portal (named My LBNL) has been developed in-house to enable users to customize the content and layout of their personal website from a checklist of links to existing on-line information. Frequently used links can be established to information sources such as the phone book, encyclopedia and dictionary, administrative databases, procedure manuals and a number of outside sources. This capability has already proven to be quite popular and, we believe goes beyond similar commercially available portal products both in terms of useful functionality and cost effectiveness.

The Ultraseek search engine has also been implemented as a Lab-wide standard to provide a more comprehensive, friendly and flexible access tool for the large amount of diverse Lab information which is now available on the web.

Property Management:

The Sunflower Asset management is being rolled out for Lab-Wide use employing a web front end. This system provides much more control of property transfers by end users, but we are concerned that the expectations of the people responsible for Property Management may be excessive.