ARCHIVED: Completed project: Travel Management System

Primary UITS contact: Jim Julovich

Completed: February 22, 2010

Description: The Travel Management System team is currently developing and implementing an enterprise-wide travel system to replace the TAPS system. This system will be used for all Indiana University faculty, staff, and students to submit travel authorization documents and initiate reimbursement requests. The new system will allow for the automation of travel approvals and processing of reimbursement requests.

Currently, Travel Office staff manually enter travel authorization and reimbursement data. The system is slow and inefficient and leads to data entry errors and delays in processing travel reimbursements for IU faculty, staff, and students. The new system will speed up processing time and provide more accurate data.

Outcome: The Travel Management System will be rolled out in stages. Currently, work is being completed on the back office portion of the applications, which facilitates processing of requests and reimbursements and provides key integration points with travel vendors such as Expedia and Enterprise. The next phase of the Travel Management System project is to distribute the travel request and reimbursement forms to select departments as a pilot group. Upon successful completion of the pilot, these documents will be integrated with Kuali Enterprise Workflow (KEW) in order to accommodate electronic routing and approval. Once automated routing and approval are ready, the Travel Management System documents will be made available to all IU faculty, staff, and students.

The new system adheres to standard J2EE web-based technologies and architecture supported within UITS.

Milestones and status:

• August 2007: Integration with Enterprise Car Rental
• November 2007: Release to add functionality to attach auto, gas, and hotel charges to trip
• June 2009 - October 2009: Integration with OneStart Workflow
• Fall 2009 - January 2010: Departmental pilot begins with July 2010 as the target date for having all departments using the new Travel Management System

Benefits:

• Faster processing time and more accurate data for travel requests and reimbursements
• Ability for travelers to track authorization and reimbursement request status through the system rather than via phone calls or campus mail
• Major technological upgrades to the current travel system
• Use of IU's standardized, virtual J2EE environments
• Many new features and enhancements

Risks: Faculty, staff, and students must become familiar with the new online forms and approval process. Effective communication and training will be important.

Issues: During the phase-out period for paper travel documents, users will have questions and will need effective support.

Primary client: Faculty, staff, and students who travel on university-related business

Client impact: Travelers will no longer have to submit paper forms for travel authorizations, approvals, and reimbursements. The speed of these transactions will also be improved.

Project team: The project team is composed of developers from the Financial Systems team and functional analysts from Procurement Services.

Governance: Procurement Services is the sponsor of this project.