‘Mosaic’ new name for ERP project

Mosaics are an art form that require patience, planning and long-term commitment. The artist must imagine the big picture while simultaneously placing each small tile with precision.

McMaster is embarking on a project that requires similar imagination and precision. It’s a project with many, many parts that need to fit together. During this project dozens of administrative systems and business processes will be replaced. Each piece is important, but like the tiles in a mosaic mural, each piece will help to form a larger picture.

This concept inspired the new name for McMaster’s ERP project: Mosaic.

“The image that Mosaic evokes — many pieces coming together to form a larger picture — is truly an apt metaphor for this project. It is bigger than any one information system. We are bringing together people, expertise and departments across McMaster. Ultimately we will have a new way of looking at the University’s operations,” said Fred Hall, chair of the Mosaic Steering Committee.

Mosaic will modernize McMaster’s business processes and replace more than 20 disparate business systems with a PeopleSoft enterprise resource planning system (ERP). The project is focused on five areas: student administration, finance, human resources, research administration and business intelligence.

In addition to its new name, Mosaic has now completed the hiring of leads for the system implementation teams. Over the next two years, the leads will guide the configuration of the new systems, imagining both the broad outlines for the new system and helping guide the arrangement of individual parts.

• Kathleen Blackwood will lead the finance team. She has been seconded from her role as assistant director of finance in the Faculty of Health Sciences. In that role she helped develop new procedures and automate processes.  She will be joined by an assistant lead, Stacey Farkas, who comes to Mosaic from McMaster’s Financial Affairs department where she is supervisor of financial reporting.
• The student administration lead is Sonya Martin who is currently the computer systems manager in Enrolment Services. She has worked at McMaster for more than 25 years and has significant experience understanding the functional needs of student administration and developing systems to address those needs.
• Anne McInnis is the research administration team lead. She brings a broad perspective to Mosaic, having worked in a number of McMaster areas such as the Registrar’s Office, Institutional Research and Analysis, the Faculty of Social Sciences, and Research Office for Administration, Development and Support (ROADS) during her 25 year career with McMaster.
• Linda Jacobsen joins McMaster as the human resources team lead. She has worked on PeopleSoft HR module implementations at several organizations across Canada. She started her career at Hamilton Health Sciences before moving to Telus and then Sun Life Financial.  She will be joined by Dave Hall who is being seconded from his current post of total compensation strategist, to serve as the assistant lead for the HR implementation team.

About Mosaic

Mosaic is McMaster’s project to modernize its business processes and replace its current business systems with an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. Mosaic will replace the current systems used for student administration, finance, research administration, human resources, and business intelligence. Replacing all of these systems at once provides a rare opportunity to modernize the University’s business processes. The project has begun a four month Fit-Gap stage to develop a comprehensive and detailed plan for implementing the system at McMaster, including more than 170 workshops with users from across the University. Implementation of the new system will start in 2013 with phased roll outs of sub-components over the next few years.

For additional information about the project refer to the Mosaic website: www.mcmaster.ca/mosaic