Grubbs has significant human resources experience. In her 12 years at NC State, she managed the changes in HR processes and systems that have resulted in increased effectiveness and efficiency, and developed and facilitated training related to HR processes.

Grubbs earned a bachelor’s degree in business management with a concentration in human resource management from NC State, has a Professional in Human Resources certification and is an AIRS certified Internet recruiter.

• Travel Services Manager
• Onboarding Specialist (3 positions)

Read the memo online.

Eventually, most finance and human resource transactions will be lifted out of individual units and colleges—along with many of the people who perform them—and moved to specialty centers, called Business Operations Centers, or BOCs.

The first BOC, scheduled to open in May, will coordinate all the activities involved in processing new hires. The next two centers will open in the fall, one to handle travel transactions and the other to handle employee recruitment and selection. Next year, four BOCs will be established to handle, respectively, time reporting, purchasing and payables, position administration and receivables.

“We’re ready to move forward,” says Scott Inkley, executive director of University Business Operations. “We’re ready to make it this happen.”

The Case for Shared Services

It’s easy to make the case for this new business structure, called shared services, to university leaders. After all, the realignment is expected to reduce NC State’s operating expenditures by 16 percent.

Scott Inkley says the reorganization will help the university continue providing high-quality business services in the face of budget cuts.

The bigger challenge is to rally everyone else on campus around the concept. To do that, Inkley is on a campus-wide tour, sitting down with deans, department  heads, directors, faculty members and staff to explain the benefits of shared services.

Faculty and staff alike will appreciate all the work that’s gone into reducing the complexity of common business processes, he says. Since last summer, cross-functional teams of finance and HR experts have been digging into dozens of processes, looking for ways to automate, streamline, simplify and standardize transactions. Although the work is far from done, Inkley is satisfied with the progress so far.

“Thanks to this massive volunteer effort, we’re making excellent progress in identifying and eliminating what we call pain points—unnecessary steps that slow things down without adding any real value,” he says.

For example, a review found that the travel authorization process varies widely across the university, involving as many as 129 separate “touch points.” A new standardized process will eliminate more than three-quarters of these steps.

Easing the Burden

Inkley is quick  to make the point to deans, department heads and faculty members that NC State is undertaking this enormously complex realignment effort primarily for them.

Finance and HR experts from across campus are working to streamline business processes.

“To be honest, we’re not doing this because people are unhappy with the quality of business services on campus,” he says. “But the status quo simply isn’t sustainable. Budget cuts have already reduced the number of employees working in finance and HR. Unless we act now and find ways to do more with less, we’re likely to face a real crisis in the coming years.”

Some departments are already seeing an impact from the reduction in state funding over the past few years. The elimination of 600 positions in 2011 didn’t eliminate the workload; it just shifted it to the remaining employees, including faculty members.

“A recent study found that scientists already spend 50 percent of their time on administrative tasks,” Inkley says. “If we’re serious about protecting the academic core of the university, we need to reduce this burden on faculty, not increase it.”

Inkley’s message for employees who work in finance and HR roles is equally direct. NC State’s top three business operations expenditures are labor-related. The only way to protect employees in a time of diminishing state support for higher education is to make the university more efficient.

But there are other benefits.

Focus on Quality

“We’re not just focused on improving processes,” Inkley says. “We’re committed to building a high-performing organization from the ground up and creating a positive, rewarding and energetic place to work.”

Employees who move into the BOCs will receive extensive training so they become experts in a particular area, like travel, instead of generalists in the whole range of business services—the current expectation in many units.

That, in turn, will help them provide better service to customers across campus.

An implementation team meets weekly to guide the two-year process of setting up Business Operations Centers.

Inkley continues to hammer on one of his guiding principles: the importance of putting quality at the center of the realignment. He’s suggested to the implementation team leading the project that University Business Operations should aspire to meet the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence, and ultimately win a Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award.

It’s an ambitious goal. To receive the Baldrige Award, an organization must be a national role model for organizational management with a system that ensures continuous improvement, efficient and effective operations and customer engagement.

Those ideals will be built into the framework of the BOCs. A plan, approved by the implementation team in January and endorsed by the chancellor, calls for the development of a wide-ranging quality control system. Each center will have customer service liaisons and cross-functional customer service teams on site. And University Business Operations will track multiple performance measures for each center, including cycle times, cost per transaction and case load ratios.

A permanent service advisory panel will be established to ensure that best practices are followed, and regular focus groups will be conducted to gauge customer satisfaction.

“NC State has always been at the forefront of scientific innovation and educational excellence ,” Inkley says. “It’s time to show what we can do in business services.”

“Thanks for your courage in thinking differently,” Woodson told the implementation team, composed of business professionals from across campus. “It says that you’re listening and learning from others.”

Chancellor Randy Woodson meets with the team implementing shared services on campus.

With Woodson’s support, the team can now move forward with its ongoing effort to streamline business services at NC State.  But instead of organizing Business Operations Centers – or BOCs – around clusters of colleges and units, they’ll organize the new centers around specific finance and human resource services.

For example, the first BOC will be an onboarding center that will coordinate all the activities involved in processing new hires. That center is scheduled to open this spring and will serve every college, department and unit at the university.

Implementation Continues

Over the coming months, the team will decide which other services will be channeled into BOCs and set a schedule for establishing the centers, which may number six or seven. With the assistance of two task forces and several process improvement groups, the implementation team will look for ways to achieve the greatest economies of scale, along with the highest levels of customer service.

For example, team members have discussed expanding the onboarding center to include other hiring services.

Dottie Haynes, a member of the BOC implementation team, discusses the plan to streamline business services across campus.

It’s possible that purchasing activities, such as travel authorizations, procurement and accounts payable will be combined in another center. Other functions that may eventually find a home in a BOC include payroll, leave services, position management, and accounts receivable, among others.

The new way of organizing the centers has the advantage of being easier to implement, Woodson said.

“What this team has proposed makes eminent sense,” he said. “Each time a new center is rolled out, people across campus will see the value more quickly, and will find it less disruptive.”

Economic Realities Drive Effort

Provost Warwick Arden said finding the most efficient and effective way of organizing the centers is critical in NC State’s “resource constrained environment.”

“I’m really excited about what will come out of this effort,” he said. “If we can move in the direction you outlined and implement shared services in a way that keeps a close eye on outcomes and measures, then we can really change the way we do business here.”

Vice Chancellor Charles D. Leffler endorses a new model for the delivery of finance and HR services across campus.

The chancellor noted that the move to streamline business services is being driven primarily by economic realities. State support for higher education, while still considerable in North Carolina, has been significantly reduced in recent years due to the economic downturn.

“The desire to move in new directions isn’t a reflection on the quality of the service we’ve provided,” he said. “The faculty and staff are committed to making this a great university. This is a result of the changing dynamics of the world we’re in and what we need to do to be successful moving forward.”

In fact, said Scott Inkley, executive director of university business operations, staff providing business services across the university have performed heroically in the face of budget cuts.

“They’ve been asked to do more and more with fewer and fewer resources,” he told the Bulletin after the meeting. “But that’s not sustainable.”

Inkley said the BOCs will open up new opportunities for many staff members.

“We will be transforming generalists on campus, whose time and attention are being divided by an ever increasing range of tasks, to deep experts in particular business services,” he said.

Communication is Key

Charles D. Leffler, vice chancellor for finance and business, said communicating with faculty and staff about the new model is essential to the success of the project. He joined the chancellor and the provost in offering to help engage the campus community.

The provost says he’s excited about the opportunity to change the way the university does business.

“It’s incumbent on everyone to be a voice on how we’re going to do this,” he said. “Simply announcing the change isn’t enough. That doesn’t answer all the questions that we know we’re going to get.”

The move to shared services began almost two years ago when the university launched a business realignment effort as part of strategic planning. Currently, finance and human resources services are provided through 36 business offices located within colleges, divisions, departments and units. Consolidating these into BOCs will help NC State achieve higher-quality service at a reduced cost, Inkley said.

He praised the implementation team’s effort to find the best model for the centers.

“We know where we are, we know where we want to be, and we think this is the best way to get there,” he said at Tuesday’s meeting.

A number of university systems are moving to shared services through efforts like the University of Missouri’s Operational Excellence Initiative and the University of California’s UC Path Initiative.

Even with the best of intentions, you can get into a lot of trouble when you’re new.

Too Many Pieces

“The new hire experience here is very chopped up,” says Stephanie Kelber. “There are so many pieces of it all over the place. You might get seven or eight communications from different departments your first week. It’s confusing when you’re new and know nothing about campus.”

A team of professionals from across campus is working to create an onboarding center. In photo at top, Stephanie Kelber leads a discussion about next steps.

Kelber should know. She’s the human resources professional who’s been tapped to spearhead the creation of a center dedicated to coordinating all the activities involved in processing new hires. The onboarding center, which hopes to find a home in the Joyner Visitor Center on the west side of campus, is scheduled to be up and running in the spring.

If all goes as planned, newly hired employees will be able to take advantage of a wide range of services through the center, including a Web portal for many of the standardized processes currently done by hand, such as filling out tax withholding forms. The center will also offer personalized assistance for more complex tasks, such as selecting benefits.

New employee orientation – now a daylong workshop that covers an exhaustive list of topics – may eventually be divided into a number of separate components that would be offered online as well as face-to-face over a period of months, Kelber says.

In the Spotlight

At an implementation meeting yesterday, members discussed ways to improve the delivery of new employee orientation.

The new hire center is the first shared services center envisioned by University Business Operations, a new division charged with streamlining and improving HR and finance services on campus. All eyes will be on the new center, Kelber says, to see if reality matches expectations. But she’s not worried about the outcome.

“We know exactly what we need to fix,” she says. “We know the best practices we need to follow, we have smart people on campus who know how to make it happen, and we have support across the university.”

The goal, Kelber says, goes beyond helping new employees process paperwork.

“Onboarding is more than saying, ‘Hello, here’s your parking pass and ID. Good luck.’ It’s about equipping new employees with everything they need to be productive in their job in the first year of employment,” she says. “They need the right kind of training and development, they need to know about our community and our culture – all the things that matter.”

Nikki Price.

Price has been a valued member of the NC State community for over 12 years, most recently as the director of facilities human resources. She comes to UBOD with a solid human resources generalist background. She earned a masters degree in human resources from Western Carolina University and a bachelors degree in criminal justice from North Carolina Central University.

Executive Director Scott Inkley welcomed price to the division and acknowledged the efforts of those who participated in the interviewing and hiring process.

“Please join us in welcoming Nikki to her new role in the University Business Operations Division,” he said.

• The finance task force and human resources task force.
• The HR process review team for hiring.

“It’s complex,” says Michael Walker, assistant dean for finance and administration in the College of Textiles. “But everyone wants this to work. Everyone has a vested interest in making this work.”

“We have to get this right,” adds Tracy Patty, assistant director of the university’s Office of Resource and Budget Management. “Whatever we implement has to work, and work well.”

Tracy Patty, co-chair of the finance task force, discusses a tool to improve travel authorizations at a recent meeting. Click for a slide show from the meeting.

For the ongoing effort to streamline business services at NC State, this is where the rubber meets the road. And it’s up to a collaborative team of professionals, supported by Walker and Patty, to keep it on track. They’re co-chairs of a finance task force set up a few months ago, along with a human resources task force, to begin evaluating and standardizing a wide range of processes that support virtually every department across the university.

If you’ve ever attended a conference, ordered supplies or received a paycheck from NC State, you’ve been on the receiving end of business services. But, as state funding for higher education has decreased, the university has found it increasingly difficult to guarantee consistent resources and services from one college or division to the next.

In July, Chancellor Randy Woodson approved a broad plan that will ultimately result in the creation of about six shared service centers on campus, called business operations centers or BOCs, as well as an onboarding center to coordinate all the activities involved in processing new hires. Since then, an implementation team with representatives from across campus has been meeting weekly with the leaders of the new division of University Business Operations to guide the effort.

Task Forces Take the Lead

The HR and finance task forces, appointed by the implementation team this fall, are drilling down even further, identifying processes that could be standardized and improved, whether they occur in the central offices, the BOCs or out in the colleges and divisions.

The finance task force is currently focused on an effort to develop tools to standardize travel authorizations and purchase-to-pay activities. The HR task force is tackling seven overarching process areas, such as hiring, position management and leave administration, and more than 50 individual processes. The task forces will provide preliminary reports to the implementation team next month.

Teamwork is the watchword for the business reorganization effort. The implementation team, task forces and process review committees draw from experts across campus.

“It’s a large group effort,” says Cathi Willoughby, who co-chairs the HR task force with Natalie Worth, a personnel officer in the College of Education.

Willoughby, a senior classification and compensation analyst in the central HR division, says developing standardized processes for many transactions will help make business services more efficient and effective, key goals of the effort.

Looking Forward

“It’s not easy but I think it’s exciting,” she says. “If we don’t shake off some of the weight of the way we’ve done things historically we’re not going to become more efficient and we’re not going to be as successful as we could be.”

Worth, who’s worked at NC State for more than 20 years, says employees have a unique chance to help guide the development of processes that will make life easier for everyone.

“Standardization is critical,” she says. “And a close working relationship between the BOCs and the people they serve is also critical. Some consolidation is needed. But it’s going to take a cultural shift.”

“We recognize that employees are the university’s most important assets and we’re going to act that way,” Scott Inkley (pictured above) told the audience in Burns Auditorium on Sept. 12. The meeting was attended by about 100 employees from the College of Design, College of Education, Poole College of Management, College of Humanities and Social Sciences, Office of Information Technology and several other departments.

Inkley was candid but optimistic as he made the case for moving many business services from departments into shared service centers called Business Operations Centers, or BOCs. Over the next two years about seven all-in-one BOCs will be phased in to handle a range of finance and human resource transactions. A separate onboarding center will also be set up to coordinate all the activities involved in processing new hires.

Shared Services Essential

The reason for the reorganization is easy to understand, Inkley said. Budget cuts over the past few years have left many departments without sufficient staff to adequately handle important business transactions. Employees have been asked to assume more and more tasks and responsibilities, with less and less support and training, yet they are getting the job done, he noted.

Scott Inkley is leading an effort to streamline business services on campus.

But that’s not sustainable over the long term, he added. That’s why it’s important to design a system that provides for greater efficiency, better training and more effective use of resources.

“Improved quality and effectiveness is what this is all about,” he said. “This is a chance to make the university better for everybody.”

Employees, in particular, will benefit from advancement and training opportunities, he said.

“We’re going to build the centers around you,” Inkley told the audience. “You are the key to our success.”

For their part, employees seemed eager to learn more about the planned reorganization and offer their suggestions. Inkley said later that feedback following the meeting was generally positive.

That’s a good sign. Inkley, who formerly directed business services for the state of South Carolina, joined NC State last December as executive director of the new division of University Business Operations. He’s relying on support from finance and HR experts across campus to successfully streamline the university’s highly decentralized operations.

The ongoing effort includes an implementation team that meets weekly to oversee the planning, design and implementation of the BOCs. Two task forces, one for human resources and one for finance, recently began the effort of analyzing a long list of business processes. And soon a number of process improvement teams will be established to drill down even further. Transition teams will be formed for each BOC to oversee the transfer of people and functions, and to evaluate how well the process is working.

More Answers to Come

Inkley couldn’t answer every question posed at the meeting with employees. He doesn’t yet know, for example, which people will move to the BOCs and which will remain at the departmental level and in the university’s central HR and finance divisions.

The onboarding specialty center is scheduled to open next January, followed in July by the first two all-in-one centers. The Office of the University Architect is working to find locations on campus for the new centers.