University of Wisconsin Human Resource System Project

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What is HRS?

With employees located at 13 four‐year universities, 13 two‐year colleges, 72 county extension offices, and several other locations, the University of Wisconsin System is the largest employer in the state. In any given month, the University issues paychecks to more than 67,000 faculty, academic staff, classified staff, and student employees. Allowing for normal turnover, the UW System issues approximately 100,000 tax forms to employees every year.

The UW System today does not have a single human resources system. Rather, UW institutions rely upon more than 700 “shadow systems”— individual computer programs at local offices that run independent of the master database. Often requiring that staff enter the same information two, three, or more times, these localized systems do not allow for reliable, accurate reporting, and the existence of so many unconnected systems increases the likelihood that sensitive data may be vulnerable to theft or error.

The Human Resource System (HRS) will modernize the UW System’s recordkeeping systems and business practices. It represents the integration of hundreds of individual systems and a massive effort to redesign the workflow in multiple work units at all UW System institutions.

The UW System is deploying up‐to‐date technology to safeguard employee data and avert major problems associated with an increasingly fragile 35‐year‐old payroll system. The new system, designed to serve institutions and employees for decades to come, will ensure full compliance with regulatory and legal requirements related to personnel information and recordkeeping.

The current UW payroll system was developed and installed in 1975, when VCRs were first being developed, and the Apple 1 computer was just being conceived. This payroll program runs on a mainframe computer, using millions of lines of code written in COBOL – a computer language that almost nobody uses anymore. The system still works today due to a group of dedicated UW staff. Like the payroll system itself, however, most of these employees are approaching or past their retirement age. There are few young programmers willing to tie their future careers to an obsolete programming language.

The current payroll system was not designed to handle evolving demands. At some point, the UW’s old payroll system will fail. The old mainframe computer, which is much more expensive to upgrade and maintain than modern enterprise hardware, will be retired. Sensitive employee data, including social security numbers and bank account numbers, will be better protected. Access to this information by individuals with legitimate work‐related needs will be even more rigorously monitored.

Using PeopleSoft, a modern suite of computer programs used by major businesses around the globe, HRS will unite these systems for the first time. It will allow UW to retire hundreds of redundant systems – saving approximately $3 million per year and vastly improve data security by housing information in a single data center. Sensitive data stored in a central repository can be better secured, efficiently monitored, and utilized to make strategic management decisions.

Campuses will move to a paperless workflow, implementing a comprehensive “self‐service” process where individual employees can access their own information without relying on HR staff to answer individual calls. Recruitment and retention efforts will be streamlined, and tax‐withholding procedures will be greatly simplified. Student payroll – serving some 34,000 student workers at any point in time – will be integrated with faculty and staff payroll records. When new statutory requirements are imposed or other required alterations are needed, changes will be vastly simpler, less labor intensive, and more reliable.

HRS will safeguard against major personnel and payroll records failures and eliminate wasteful costs associated with outdated, redundant systems. There is no “good time” to embark on such a major project, but the probability that the current systems will fail will increase dramatically in coming years. At the same time, critical IT staff will be lost to retirement. Delaying the project now would mean higher costs later.