Information Services & Technology (IS&T) — with the Office of the Vice President for Finance (VPF) and Student Financial Services (SFS) as co-sponsors — recently piloted an application that automates creating and making changes to hourly paid student appointments at MIT.
With about 7,000 new hourly paid student appointments each year, not to mention changes and terminations, both students and authorized administrators stand to benefit from a streamlined, web-based system. When the Student Hourly Appointment (SHA) application launches on June 6, about 250 authorized users in departments, labs and centers (DLCs) will be able to do all of their transactions through a new Student Worker tab in SAPweb.
This tab will provide one convenient place to create, change and cancel hourly student appointments and to view transactions and appointment reports. The system will even send email notifications to the initiator and student when transactions are complete. With automated workflows in place, the SHA application will deliver improved accuracy, efficiency and compliance, which should please both administrators and student workers.
Users deserve a round of applause
The SHA application represents another successful instance of the Digital MIT initiative. Several of those who process student appointments deserve their share of the credit for the application's effectiveness.
From the outset, members of an SHA project user group helped to define requirements and shape the design of the application. When the application was ready to be piloted, 37 users volunteered to test the system and gave valuable feedback. Says Anna Ferrigno, a user group member and pilot participant from the Department of Mathematics, "The form is much more user friendly and eliminates the need for any paper-based record keeping, which is great. I also like being able to review the transaction details before submitting and the almost instantaneous setup in SAP."
Another user group member and pilot participant, Jarina Shrestha, from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, comments that, "It's so wonderful that the appointments are fed into SAP and that students can enter their timesheet hours in a couple of minutes. The process is very fast. I also love the View Transaction function, where you can see the status of all appointments, and the reports that allow you to view a student's entire hourly position history, even from other DLCs."
Getting up to speed
Eager to learn about the SHA application? IS&T has scheduled four hour-long demos in E17-121:
You can also take training modules through the MIT Learning Center, available via the Training tab in SAPweb Self Service. To search for SHA courses, use the keyword "student hourly." In addition, IS&T has posted Student Hourly Appointment Help pages in the Knowledge Base. If you have questions about the SHA application, send mail to payroll@mit.edu.
With about 7,000 new hourly paid student appointments each year, not to mention changes and terminations, both students and authorized administrators stand to benefit from a streamlined, web-based system. When the Student Hourly Appointment (SHA) application launches on June 6, about 250 authorized users in departments, labs and centers (DLCs) will be able to do all of their transactions through a new Student Worker tab in SAPweb.
This tab will provide one convenient place to create, change and cancel hourly student appointments and to view transactions and appointment reports. The system will even send email notifications to the initiator and student when transactions are complete. With automated workflows in place, the SHA application will deliver improved accuracy, efficiency and compliance, which should please both administrators and student workers.
Users deserve a round of applause
The SHA application represents another successful instance of the Digital MIT initiative. Several of those who process student appointments deserve their share of the credit for the application's effectiveness.
From the outset, members of an SHA project user group helped to define requirements and shape the design of the application. When the application was ready to be piloted, 37 users volunteered to test the system and gave valuable feedback. Says Anna Ferrigno, a user group member and pilot participant from the Department of Mathematics, "The form is much more user friendly and eliminates the need for any paper-based record keeping, which is great. I also like being able to review the transaction details before submitting and the almost instantaneous setup in SAP."
Another user group member and pilot participant, Jarina Shrestha, from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, comments that, "It's so wonderful that the appointments are fed into SAP and that students can enter their timesheet hours in a couple of minutes. The process is very fast. I also love the View Transaction function, where you can see the status of all appointments, and the reports that allow you to view a student's entire hourly position history, even from other DLCs."
Getting up to speed
Eager to learn about the SHA application? IS&T has scheduled four hour-long demos in E17-121:
- June 5 at 1:30 p.m.
- June 6 at 10 a.m.
- June 12 at 1:30 p.m.
- June 14 at noon
You can also take training modules through the MIT Learning Center, available via the Training tab in SAPweb Self Service. To search for SHA courses, use the keyword "student hourly." In addition, IS&T has posted Student Hourly Appointment Help pages in the Knowledge Base. If you have questions about the SHA application, send mail to payroll@mit.edu.
