UC San Diego

Campus Asset Management System
(CAMS)

1.Submitter’s Contact Information:

Bill McCarroll
Manager, General Accounting & Equipment Management
Business & Financial Services, UC San Diego

858-534-4736

2.Project Leaders & Team Members:

Project Owner / Bill McCarroll
Project Manager / Jamie Wheat
Technical Support Administrator / Steve Ste. Marie
Business Rules and System Edits Administrator / Maria Lieggi
System Administrator / Bessie Douglas
Project Sponsors
Vice Chancellor, UC San Diego Business Affairs / Steve Relyea
Assistant Vice Chancellor, Academic Computing / Elazar Harel
Assistant Vice Chancellor Business & Financial Services /Controller / Don Larson
Financial Applications
Director, Financial Systems / Kian Colestock
Project Lead / Mike McGill
Marketplace Application / Bill Sweetman
Security and Network Applications
Single Sign On (SSO) / Matt Elder
Single Sign On (SSO) / Everett Stauffer
Systems
UCSD/EAMS Classic Development / Steven Higgins
Jayne Reynolds
Surplus Sales/Storehouse
Steve Van Duine
David Gomez
AssetWorks (formally InCircuit)
Kim Vela-Walker
Sean Pugatch
Ellena Howze
Dean Herbert
Darrin Daigle
Campus Users (Super Users)
Division of Biological Sciences / Monica Flores
Integrated Oceanography Division / Minerva Nelson
Geosciences Research Division / Jan Hess
Department of Medicine / Kathryn Caro
Clinical Engineering / Andy Aguinaldo
Clinical Engineering / Deborha McManus
Marine Physical Laboratory / Martha Flores
San Diego Supercomputer Center / Cindy Lee
San Diego Supercomputer Center / Sonia Nayak

3.Summary

UC San Diego’s legacy asset management system (EAMS) was developed in the early 90’s. It was written in ObjectPal which is part of the Paradox 7 platform. EAMS didn’t have the ability to accept accounting data to value each asset that could then be matched and reconciled to the general ledger and the campus financial statements in accordance with accepted accounting principles. We were also facing resource constraints due to budget cuts. The number of dedicated Equipment Management staff in General Accounting fell from a previous high of four to only one individual who is now responsible for central oversight of all campus equipment inventories. Federal and state compliance vigilance has also increased requiring accurate inventories that can be validated for assurance on grants and awards. We have a distributed accountability environment and so rely on up to 900 users across campus to manage inventorial assets. These campus custodians needed a modern automated tool for effective inventory management. EAMS also didn’t have the capabilities we needed to effectively track movement of assets on campus. These weaknesseswere noted in a 2004 audit report as a repeat finding.

As a result, the campus recognized the need to bring new asset management capabilities to UC San Diego and set out to find a vendor who could meet our needs through a formal bid process. We required our new tool to have the capability to accurately capture and account for all assets throughout their life cycles from initial purchase to final disposition. As a result, we had to integrate the new Campus Asset Management System (CAMS) with our purchasing and disbursements systems and with surplus sales to accommodate disposal of obsolete equipment and non-inventorial assets like office equipment and furniture. The system also had to reflect daily transfers of equipment between departments and account for changes in location of the assets. The new system had to also accommodate tracking of assets loaned to other institutions and assets that we are borrowing. Most importantly, the value of our inventory had to reconcile to our financial records.

After a competitive bidding process, UC San Diego’s General Accounting office and Academic Computing partnered with AssetWorks (formerly InCircuit Development Corporation) to mutually customize the vendor’s off-the-shelf hosted solution to provide a complete Asset Management System for UC San Diego. The system was required to help us effectively manage inventoriable and non-inventoriable assets at the University to ensure adequate care, maintenance, financial records, physical inventory, disposal and control of University equipment and other assets. Design and development activities spanned approximately eighteen months of close collaboration between our vendor, ACT and General Accounting/Equipment Management. We went live with our new system in March 2010.

4.Background

Assets at UC San Diego are centrally managed at UC San Diego with distributed responsibility to Department Property Administrators (custodians) for department inventories.

A department’s property administrator is responsible for the actual identification and tracking of inventorial equipment within each Department. Departments now use CAMS to track their own inventories that are then consolidated by Equipment Management for the campus.

As mentioned previously, CAMS is a hosted solution and was developed by AssetWorks (formerly InCircuit Development) As a hosted solution, CAMS saves local campus resources for maintenance and recurring support while keeping the software currentwithscheduled upgrades.

The three levels of security within CAMS in addition to single sign-on are Administrator, Approver and General User.

CAMS is able to integrate with the databases already deployed within UC San Diego’s Business Affairs (DB2, MS SQL Server, Oracle).

In addition to current department needs, we anticipatedgrowth and the need for additional departments toaccept property administrator responsibilities in the future. CAMS iscompletely scalable and flexible to accommodate growth. CAMS is also capable of being completely shareable within the UC system and has the potential to be scalable as a strategic database that UC could develop as a system to be able to capture inventorial data for all campuses.

A sampling of institutions who have adopted AssetWorks software include:

Education: / State Governments: / Government Contractors:
Baton Rouge Community College / Alabama / Anteon Corporation
Coahoma Community College / Florida / Cubic Applications, Inc.
Holmes Community College / Illinois / EOD Technology, Inc.
Louisiana Delta Community College / Louisiana / SERCO
Louisiana State University / Massachusetts / Siemens
Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College / Mississippi / Vought Aircraft Industries
Mississippi State University / South Carolina
Texas A & M University / Texas
University of California - San Diego
University of Connecticut
University of Texas

The number of users and UC San Diego asset values include the following:

  • Estimated department users online at any one time is 10-12
  • There are8CAMS system administrators and 2 Surplus Administrators
  • There are 770 total users on CAMS made up of 233 guests (view only), 198 departmental equipment custodians and 339 departmental equipment administrators.
  • There are 786 custody codes including the Medical Center with 245.
  • Current total value of campus assets in CAMS is $921,152,294; including the UC San Diego Medical Center total of $183,789,423.
  • Total number of items is approximately 34,761 active items (5,371 at Medical Center), 668 active non-inventorial items and 145,879 disposed items.
  • Staff trained since February 2010 is 359.

* The Medical Center uses the University’s system to track its inventory; the purchase order information is fed from its own Purchasing system.

Property administrators use CAMS (Campus Asset Management System) to electronically manage department inventorial equipment to:

  • Make online changes to the inventorial equipment database
  • Electronically process a Surplus Transfer Request (STR) to Surplus Sales or disposal of an asset
  • Search for inventorial equipment by UCID number, asset description, serial number from CAMS Quick Search, or CAMS advanced search
  • Make edits to the asset record, attach documents or pictures to the asset record, or review historical information about the asset
  • Find the Custodian responsible for department inventorial equipment
  • Loan and borrow equipment
  • Reduce paper processing (paper forms no longer needed for Surplus Sales, interdepartmental transfers, and disposals)
  • Define electronic role based approvals
  • Sort and select options for reports, generate and print multiple reports which are either custom or template driven, view and update accounting details
  • View the PO report in FinancialLink with one click
  • Manage non-inventorial equipment/ supplies with the CAMS elective module
  • Auto complete vehicle inventories with smart VIN lookup and data entry

5.Project Requirements

We designed the following success criteria for the UC San Diego Campus Asset Management System:

Inventory Management

Ability to report expenditures for equipment to federal, state, and private funding agencies as recorded under “acquisition value” and “current value” in the asset record

Accurately record the inventory value, including depreciation, of equipment located at UCSD. Depreciation is not calculated or tracked by the current system, but tracked by the UCOP system so we needed to be able to generate accurate capitalization reports that met UC’s criteria. We kept the option open to have the ability to calculate and track depreciation on selected items at UC San Diego if required in the future.

CAMS must be able to accurately track the acquisition cost (including changes and adjustments during the purchasing or fabrication process) to ensure accurate and reconcilable values are entered into the University’s accounting system that agree with values in our asset management system.

Make records of equipment transactions available to UCSD's auditing agencies. CAMS keeps a full record of all changes made to assets from purchase through final disposal.

Migrate legacy data accurately fromprevious EquipmentManagement System-EAMS.

Generate accurate annual reports to UCOP consisting of length delimited text files listing selected fields from each record in asset file.

Generate accurate semi-annual reports showing total net changes of acquisition and current values in the asset file and a detail listing of all transactions that comprise the total net change.

Surplus Sales

Campus Surplus Sales processes unneeded items for sale to other Departments or to outside parties. We seamlessly integrated CAMS to process transactions to the legacy surplus sales system which we decided to keep as a proven and effective tool.

CAMS is able to track methods and status of equipment disposal after it has been determined that the excess material is of no immediate use within the University system in accordance with UC Policy (Business and Finance Bulletins BUS-49, "Cashiering Responsibilities and Guidelines," and A-51, "Application of Proceeds from the Sale, Trade-In or Transfer of University Property") and to remain in conformance with federal regulations and law for federally titled or federally owned property managed by the University.

CAMS needed to facilitate and support surplus sales operations with functionalities for collection, marketing, tracking and documentation of equipment through the surplus sales operational process.

Any asset disposals or sales update the active asset inventory and provide adjustments accurately in the University’s accounting records. Transfer and disposal transactions to surplus sales are handled by CAMS as an interface with the surplus sales system.

The surplus sales system then manages the sales order process providing selected data that is integrated back into CAMS and the financial system.

The surplus sales process may be initiated at the Equipment Management level as well as at the Custodian level with appropriate approvals.

6.Project Description

CAMS establishesaccess based on user profiles and grants permissions based on those profiles

System Administrator in Equipment Management reviews and approves all assets imported to CAMS and all disposals are approved by CAMS-Administrator. The Administrator can also create Inventorial Assets and approves all user access.

Department Users: (Custodian is the highest department level) is the final approver for surplus transfer requests and interdepartmental transfers. They also create non-Inventorial assets for their department.

Departmental Equipment Administrator (DEA) updates assets details, creates transfers and disposals, and generates loan requests.

Guest – everyone initially must register as a Guest first via Single Sign On, and then follow up with department DSA to request additional access.

Surplus Administrator submits disposal files for property sold via Surplus Sales.

Surplus Operator receives property at Surplus for sale or disposal via CAMS Surplus Module

HOME Tab and Navigating CAMS

The top of the screen contains the following links:
Home - returns user to this main welcome page
Help - opens a window with additional help about the current screen
Support - opens a window that allows user to send a message or question to technical support staff. There are also embedded tutorial videos available on the system for user assistance in specific subjects.
Sign Out - signs user out of the application when finished.
Under these links are tabs that represent the menu of options available to each user. If user clicks on any of these tabs, they will see a sub-menu listed under the tab with additional options.

User Tabs are displayed and sub-tabs are displayed just below the main tab.

The first two regions on the screen contain the Quick Search and User Info boxes:
Quick Search - enter any portion of an asset number and then press the Enter key or click the Search button to retrieve a list of assets that have matching asset numbers.

Quick Search: by UCID number or Transfer Number – user enters a portion of the UCID or the entire UCID number to view the Asset by UCID # (Asset number).

Two quick search options for search are available for Assets:

Quick Search from the Welcome screen (search default asset status of all).

Quick Search from the Assets tab (search assets by default status of not inactive and assets tab offers sub-tabs for Advance Search and Create).

Quick Search also allows user to search multiple assets. Enter the first part of the UCID number and view multiple assets (see more details regarding Quick Search by clicking Help at the top of the screen).

From the Help button users can access a variety of online video tutorials to assist them at any time.

The Asset Detail screens

1)Enter the UCID number or Description to view Asset Detail screen.

At the bottom of the screen there are additional regions that can be expanded to display additional information about the asset. Click the plus icon next to the region and it will expand to show additional information. The following is a list of common regions (but the regions user actually will see on their screen depend on permissions):
Accounting - This region displays the accounting ledger for the asset and lists entries such as Original Acquisition, Upgrade, Depreciation, and Disposal.

Documents & Images - This region allows user to attach, edit and view images and documents related to the asset.

History - This region lists all changes made to the asset. Each line displays the following: Date/Time the change was made, the Field that was changed, the New and Old values for the field that was changed, the Username of the user that made the change, and the History Type (the type of change that was made, such as User Edit, Import, or Change Request).

Validation - The region displays information collected from bar code scanner during the physical inventory process.It displays the date/time the asset was scanned, the user that performed the scan, and whether the asset information was correct as-is or was modified.

Validation Region - Scan and Validate

Scan & Validate is end-to-end software for automating the asset inventory process. It works with scanners to automate the collection of inventory data in the field, but it's much more than scanner software. Scan & Validate easy-to-use features automate the reconciliation, validation, reporting and all administrative oversight of the campus inventory.

VIN Explosion

CAMS populates specific vehicle information based on entry of the Vehicle Identification Number. This has increased the accuracy and quality of vehicle information for fleet management. Risk Management has also leveraged this data to increase the accuracy of their database to lower insurance costs.

Surplus Transfers, Inter-Departmental Transfers and Disposals

Transfers(nowa completely paperless process)

Three types of Transfers – Inter Departmental (UCSD campus only); Temporary Transfer (loan to another department at UCSD, not within user’s custody codes); Surplus Transfer Requests (all transfers to Surplus Sales) which include Assets (inventorial) and Elective assets (Non-Inventorial).

Approvals: CAMS uses a strict automated process which requires an automated approval and automated receive system. Everything activity is tracked in the History region. No approval required for transferring assets within a department that has multiple custody codes (e.g. School of Medicine).

CAMS Transfers tab include two distinct sub-tabs, “Transfer” and “Surplus.”

Transfer sub-tab: this is the default sub-tab. Three regions to the Transfer sub-tab: Quick Search, Search Transfers and Create Transfer.

Transfers to Surplus Sales:

This screen allows user to search for surplus transfers or initiate new surplus transfers of assets.