Financial Aid’s 'Little App Engine That Could'

Session Number: 27536
Track: Financial Aid
Sub-Categorization: Showcasing Customizations
Session Type: Tips and Tricks
Presenter: Debbie Rickes (University at Albany)
Co-presenter: Pam Lantzy (University at Albany)

Room(s)/
Time(s):

Room 211 => Mon, Mar 01, 2010 (10:45 AM - 11:45 AM)

Target Audience: All
Audience Level: Intermediate
Level of Customization: Bolt-On
Project Phase: Production
Project Go Live: Earlier than 2007
Version Presenting: PS 9.0
Product: PeopleSoft
CPE Eligible: No

The University at Albany has harnessed the power of an app engine program and component interfaces to reduce the need for manually validating and posting of financial aid awards. We created an app engine program that uses component interfaces to replicate the business functionality for aid year activation, building FA terms, and award entry to accomplish this. We have formatted transactional award data that can come from varying sources – data files created by queries, data files created by SQRs, and a custom award table. Our process loads the data and then uses the Component Interfaces to perform the business logic necessary to validate and post the awards. We have a secondary process that reports what happened for the Financial Aid Office to review.
By using this technology of Component Interfaces, we maintain the business process integrity of the PS module and have significantly reduced the man hours needed to record these awards. For example at least once a semester this process handles over 12,000 award transactions in about 12 hours. It results in adjustments to about 3000-4000 student packages! Imagine how long it would take staff to do this? This process is successfully used not only in a production batch environment but also called upon by the Financial Aid staff to transition incoming data from external files to the student’s package with much less manual intervention and far less turnaround time.
We would love to share how our process works and what custom processes we have developed to load external data; funnel the award transactions to this app engine process; and report back to the user office about the results of the processing. Once designed and implemented, it became a highly flexible tool for managing awards in Financial Aid.

For Questions / Assistance - Email: support@alliance-conference.com - Phone: 602-734-5356

This event is hosted by the Higher Education User Group, Inc., which also handles all financial related processing