UPlan Frequently Asked Questions
About UPlan
UPlan is the name chosen for UCSF's application of Oracle's Hyperion Planning. Prior to October 2013 documentation and meetings refer to the system as Hyperion, and now that it has been named UPlan, it is referred to by that name.
Oracle Hyperion Planning is a centralized, Excel and Web-based planning, budgeting and forecasting solution that integrates financial and operational planning processes and improves organizational predictability. Oracle Hyperion Planning provides an in-depth look at UCSF operations and its related impact on financials, by tightly integrating financial and operational planning models. It has the benefits of:
- Ensuring accuracy - Validating forecasts with integrated, best-in-class analytics
- Reducing budgeting time - Improving cycles by weeks or months
- Aligning the organization - Combining financial and operational planning in one system
- Addressing finance needs quickly - Meeting immediate finance needs while enabling operations-specific budgeting processes
- Maximizing modeling capabilities - Supporting advanced, power user modeling capabilities with nearly seamless Microsoft Excel integration
- Gaining mass user acceptance - Appealing to a wider user community through a simplified Web interface
- Reducing implementation time - Adding quick-to-implement, packaged functional planning modules
Access and Support
UPlan is accessible through MyAccess. If you do not have access and feel you should, contact your department manager or Control Point Coordinator.
Most likely you are experiencing a browser issue. Make sure you are using a tested browser and configuring it appropriately by following the UPlan job aids 201 and/or 202 available here. If you still cannot get on, call the help desk at 44100 option 2.
Those who have been determined to need training to access UPlan at Go-Live have been informed in January. If you feel you need training but have not been contacted, contact your department manager or Control Point Coordinator.
Contact your department manager or Control Point Coordinator to find out more. An introductory training module, UPlan 101, and various job aids are available on the UPlan Training Site.
Employee and general planning diagnostic reports will be open access and available to all UPlan users. However, planning forms for data entry will have security and be based on the Dept ID tree.
General Planning
Planning level on the Dept ID tree is determined by each department in coordination with their control point. Generally, choosing to plan at a higher level reduces your UPlan workload.
Departments will need to maintain consistency in their planning level within any given year. Mid-year changes will not be possible. Changes in planning level across years are possible, but it is worth noting that doing so means historical data will be of less use (i.e., for variance reporting). Changes will have to adhere to the current guidelines of choosing a Dept ID budgeting level.
Plans will be locked down quarterly. Once the plan is shipped to the data warehouse, it remains static. The first load will be late June 2014, after which you can forecast quarterly.
UPlan will have scenarios that include an annual plan and quarterly forecasts so that you can have the flexibility to update. You can make a new forecast every quarter, and once you choose to make that forecast final, you can run your variance reporting out of the data warehouse using MyReports. Until it is submitted as final, you can do variance reporting within UPlan. Except for sponsored projects activity, which will remain in Faculty/PI Portfolio, all of your planning activity will occur in UPlan.
Once plans are finalized, they will be in the data warehouse and everyone will be able to see them. However, some sensitive employee-level detail may not be visible across departments, such as planned percentage raises. For this reason, it may be difficult to see an employee from another department planned against one of your funds.
No – data from PPS is actual and data from PI Portfolio is plan.
The UPlan design includes completion tracking functionality per Dept/Fund/Project combination that would allow users to indicate completion of a plan.
Right now the only functionality that allows this will be copying data. SmartView functionality (integration with MS Office), which has had a limited rollout, will allow exporting of data. Right now there are no plans to allow re-uploading of data.
Revenue Account 4500C Sponsored Projects Revenue is a Read Only account (greyed out) because, in the Working version (for non-actualized months), it auto-balances to Expense and Other Changes account balances, resulting in a Change in Net Position equal to zero. However, this auto-balancing occurs only with DeptID-Fund combinations with one of the 3 ADJ Sponsored Projects (2011368: ADJ Sponsored NoNIHCap; 2011369: ADJ Sponsored NIHCap1; 2011370: ADJ Sponsored NIHCap2).
If you need to adjust revenue plans or forecasts for sponsored projects so that there is a non-zero Change in Net Position, you can use the “4600C Assessments/other revenues_C” account as a placeholder.
UPlan does not include Project IDs for these 4 of the 12 Project Uses: Sponsored, Recruitment, Retention, Other Faculty/PI Owner Activity. Planning occurs at the Project Use level for projects with these Project Use attributes. Changes to a Project ID’s Project Use attribute will be updated in UPlan, but the exact timing remains to be determined. New Project IDs are loaded to UPlan nightly.
Data in the Tfr accounts are Commitments from the Commitment Tracking module. To learn more about the Commitments on your Revenue & Expense form, run a “Commitments by Target” report via the Explore button, using the specific DeptID where you see the Tfr account value.
A calendar of scheduled data integration's is located here: http://controller.ucsf.edu/calendar.asp
Employee Planning
All departments have been asked to map non-planning Dept IDs to planning Dept IDs. Using this map, UPlan will be able to take the feed of data from PPS and map an employee's home department to the correct planning Dept ID. Whichever users have been granted access to those Dept IDs will then be able to change the plan of an employee associated with it.
When an employee is funded by more than one department, the PPS Home department will set the employee’s salary level in UPlan. The funding departments will adjust the percentage of the employee’s pay distribution that they fund based on the salary level in Hyperion. A report displaying the full distribution of individual employees for the funding department is available in UPlan. Communication and coordination with your counterparts in other departments around shared employee planning will remain essential.
It is our understanding that UC Path, when it is introduced in the coming years, will come on line with some position planning functionality. We are keeping up to date with this functionality to ensure that there isn't duplicative functionality and that the two systems are integrated.
UPlan will provide some functionality for planning graduate students. The salaries and benefits of graduate student employees will be planned using the same functionality use for other employees. Stipend expenses can be planned in a similar manner.
Yes, the data may be sorted in this manner.
Employee benefits will be planned for you in UPlan based on estimates, however estimates may be off a bit. Actual benefit numbers will be available by the January Go-Live. In any case, there is an adjustment field to make changes to benefit numbers as necessary. Actual benefit expenditures will be fed from PPS to UPlan.
Commitment Tracking
For each commitment, only the source department and recipient department will be able to view the planning data.
No commitments will be created by the Med Center, but what you can do is create, on your end (the recipient end), a negative commitment (negative commitments will be covered in UPlan training). Alternately you could add the appropriate account and enter the amount as revenue rather than a transfer directly in General Planning.
Faculty Portfolio
Yes. Aggregated sponsored project activity entered in Faculty Portfolio into UPlan quarterly. Once in UPlan, data from Faculty Portfolio will be read-only. Users may use planning-only projects to make adjustments to their departmental plan for sponsored activity, faculty recruitment, faculty retention and other faculty/PI projects. The planning feed from Faculty Portfolio to UPlan will not maintain distinctions by Project, Activity Period, Function or Flexfield. No feed from UPlan to Faculty/PI Portfolio will be developed. Click here to see how data flows between the systems. Note that although Faculty Portfolio data will be aggregated in UPlan’s planning forms, a report will be available which will allow you to see more detail.
You have two options. You can either communicate with your RSA to make the changes in FP, which then will feed quarterly to UPlan, or you can make the changes in UPlan at a more aggregated level using a planning-only project. Any adjustments made in UPlan would not feed back to Faculty Portfolio.
We encourage you to think about the timing for your own plan, when it needs to be submitted, and when internal deadlines might be (including periods where you will not be accepting any changes) and then communicate those to your RSAs.
No, because the quarterly feed does not go to the same intersection as where your changes will be entered.
There is functionality in Phase 1 to bring over NIH cap information. When the data comes over from Faculty Portfolio, the system will reference coding in RAS to identify which NIH cap applies. There is no functionality for other caps (non-NIH), which will need separate detailed business processes.
We strongly recommend that you implement Faculty Portfolio in your department. However, UPlan's planning-only project functionality enables department planners to create a high-level sponsored activity plan. Those departments that do not adopt Faculty Portfolio, but continue using a departmental system, will be adding to their workload by having to enter sponsored activity twice- once in each system.
Faculty Portfolio data will be loaded into UPlan on a quarterly basis. The exact date will be announced via the UPlan listserv.
