Dear Peralta Community,
We have exciting updates regarding the Peralta Community College District contracts process to share with you!
These updates are in response to the Contracts Workshop and Listening Session Chancellor Gilkerson hosted on April 25th and the follow-up Contracts Workshop at Laney Fieldhouse on August 9th. Beginning on October 1, 2024, contract processing in the PeopleSoft Finance Management application (https://fm.peralta.edu) has a more streamlined workflow process and improved notifications.
Here's what changed on October 1st:
- Change of Approval Order by moving Legal Review after the Department Manager approval step — this empowers managers and helps ensure contracts have business approval before moving to the legal team for review.
- Streamlining Contract Approval Process. We reduced the number of approvers from fourteen to six.
- Updated and Simplified Standard Contract Templates for Independent Contractor Contracts (ICCs), and Amendments to ICCs, as well as Performer Agreements (up to $3,000) which do not require a requisition or PO; i.e. Guest speakers, DJs, and dance performers.
- Updated Contract Types for Campus Contracts, Grants Agreements, Miscellaneous Documents, Revenue-Generating Agreements, and Vendor Templates.
- Improved Notifications, including email notifications of the status of PeopleSoft tickets sent to the entire contract approval "tree" — all the people involved in the contract workflow. This notification includes one to the initiator after the legal team approves, so the initiator can prepare the contract for uploading to BoardDocs for Board of Trustees approval.
Additional updates coming on October 15th:
- Auto Dispatch — Once the contract signature is completed, the initiator is notified that it needs to be dispatched.
- Vendor Direct Pay — A new system allows us to pay vendors for small-value goods or services below a specific threshold ($3000). In other words, we will bypass the need for a Purchase Order, making the payment faster to the smaller vendors we work with.
- Purchase Order Notifications — These are notifications when a PO is dispatched for a Requestor or a change has been processed.
There's much more work to be done as we continue to improve the contracts' workflow, but these changes taking effect in October should help all those involved with processing contracts in PeopleSoft.
Additional changes in the pipeline include changing the threshold value of contracts that require Board of Trustees approval, which is currently contracts over $50,000. The suggested updates for BP 6340 and AP 6340 were discussed at the September 20th Planning and Budgeting Council meeting.
Training materials for the PeopleSoft Finance Management application that include these updates are being developed and will be available in Canvas shortly.
Office hours are available to everyone on Mondays from 1-3pm via Zoom. You can join Brandi Howard and Sasha Amiri-Nair here at this Zoom link: https://peralta-edu.zoom.us/j/84578712703.
If you have any questions, please send them to Mark Johnson at markjohnson@peralta.edu so he can facilitate getting answers and creating an FAQ document.
This announcement was submitted by Mark Johnson on behalf of the Contract Process Improvement Team. If you have any questions, please contact Mark at markjohnson@peralta.edu.
