Tennessee Tech beginning the process of switching to a new finance and human resources system called Talon.
Senior Vice President for Planning and Finance Dr. Claire Stinson said the university’s current system has been in use for more than 20 years. Stinson said the new system is great at generating financial reports and is much more efficient.
“When you start filling it out, it will automatically default to a number that you typically use, and then you have a chance to change it if you need to,” Stinson said. “But people are not having to enter in all of these numbers and take a chance that they are not right.”
Stinson said the university will begin its transition plan next month, in hopes of having the new system up and running by January. Stinson said the goal is to limit disruptions while transitioning systems.
“Anytime that you are working with systems of this size that our finance and HR systems are, yeah, you are gonna have a few glitches as you go live on a new system,” Stinson said. “But I expect that with a lot of training, like I said, we’ve developed detailed cut-over schedules. We are communicating with the campus on what those timeframes are and all of that sort of thing. So I think it’s gonna be fairly smooth, especially for the implementation of a system this complex.”
Stinson said the switch will have a limited impact on faculty and staff. Stinson said the switch will not have much of an impact on students, as the university will still keep the student portion of the Banner system.
“There’s not a really good student system out there yet,” Stinson said. “I know Oracle is working on one, and there are other companies that are working on developing a new, more modern student system. But for the most part, students will be impacted only if they are working on campus and they need to enter time, they would interact with the new system.”
Stinson said the Talon system cost an estimated $20 million. Stinson said the state covered the cost, as other universities across the state are switching to the Talon system.
