New Timecard System Will Take Time to Get Used to
Jasper Everingham | February 2, 2023
Beginning in the Spring 2023 semester, Warren Wilson College (WWC) transitioned to a new program — UKG — to record and log hours for its work program. In an effort to minimize confusion caused by this shift, the Work Program Office (WPO) has posted resources on MyWWC and offered student training on how to use the new software to log work hours. Paul Bobbitt, the Associate Dean of Work at WWC, said he expects the new system to be a marked improvement from what WWC was using in the past.
“In 2017, we onboarded… our main campus-wide software system, Jenzabar,” Bobbitt said. “MyWWC is the outward-facing version of Jenzabar. And the old timecard process that [students] used to do in MyWWC last semester, that's in the Jenzabar time and attendance module.”
Michael Craven, the Data Operations Coordinator for the Center for Experiential Learning at WWC said that many of the benefits UKG offers the college serve to make things run more smoothly for college IT and the WPO, and might not be as tangible for students. One of those benefits is the possibility to pay students working for cash much more rapidly than under the previous system.
“In our old system when we ran break payroll, [the system was set up to] only run it the week after break,” Craven said. “If you did not get your information in or something was wrong with that, you had to wait to the next break’s payroll, so sometimes students were waiting three or four months to get paid. With this new system, we can actually do both of those payrolls at the exact same time. We can run our academic and our cash-paid positions in the same payroll, so students [are] actually able to get paid a lot faster now.”
According to Bobbitt, it also is now much easier to run both student and staff payrolls under the same system.
“[Previously], both human resources for professional staff and the WPO, which is effectively the human resources for students, were in the same [Jenzebar] module,” Bobbitt said. “We couldn't pay students and staff at the same time: we actually had to stop, pay staff, stop, pay students, stop, pay staff. [It was like] a one-lane bridge that works on a two-lane road. UKG is actually a four-lane bridge on a two-lane road. It allows us to do multiple things: we can pay many different types of students and many different types of staff and faculty all at the same time.”
However, implementing UKG and establishing it as a new system is not an easy task, said Craven. He said there were a number of smaller details that students most likely wouldn’t notice, but that the WPO and IT departments are still working to sort out.
“If I have to hire a student,” Craven said as an example. “That's a little bit more intensive at the moment just because we don't have all the years behind us like we had any other system, where we had custom stuff created. I know our IT department is currently working on that to make that transition a little smoother.”
Another aspect that both Craven and Bobbitt echoed was the process of getting the rest of WWC accustomed to the new system.
“There's a little bit of growing pain right now,” Bobbitt said. “Because it's new, and we onboarded it over winter break. So not everybody was, you know, some people weren't aware that we're making a change, and other people just didn't know about the change that we got back.”
Additionally, the UKG mobile app was experiencing some technical problems when it was first launched, according to Craven. Bobbitt also said that as of the morning of Jan. 31st, about 200 students still had yet to log any hours in UKG at all.
But ultimately, Craven and Bobbitt strongly echoed one another in their belief that UKG will prove to be a much more versatile, better system for WWC once the college adjusts to it.
“We're just getting [UKG] out of the box and putting the batteries in it right now, Bobbitt said. “We're not going to undo it or go back anytime soon. It will meet the needs of our community, both professional staff and students, I think, in a very robust way once we get done getting the bells and whistles dialed in.”