"Kuali" is a name campus has been hearing for several years, ever since Cornell became a partner in the Kuali Foundation to develop the Kuali Financial System (KFS) with other higher education institutions. The name has become increasingly familiar since June 2009, when the three-year project to implement KFS at Cornell began.

Now staff members, especially those in finance and administrators who access financial reports, are beginning to hear details of how KFS will affect their day-to-day work as the July 1, 2011, launch date grows closer. That's when KFS will replace the university's decades-year old, mainframe-based financial systems with a unified application designed, as the Kuali Foundation says, "by higher ed, for higher ed" to process and report on purchasing and accounts payable and manage grants, endowments and other university business.

KFS is arguably the largest business system Cornell has adopted, and it will affect more than 5,000 staff members, most of whom will access its data through reporting tools. Bringing KFS to campus has involved close collaboration between the Division of Financial Affairs and Cornell Information Technologies, with help from hundreds of staff members across campus who are helping analyze new business processes, validating the KFS chart of accounts structure, working with the KFS project team to understand if and how they should change their interfaces and systems to work with KFS, defining business requirements for information delivery and reporting, and testing KFS itself.

Cornell's Administrative Streamlining Program will affect how the university will use KFS. Several working groups, spearheaded by Joanne DeStefano, Cornell's vice president for finance and chief financial officer, are working to set standard operating procedures for at least 40 KFS transaction processes.

"Because KFS is being designed to achieve the goal of maximum efficiency, it is inextricably connected to the many simultaneous efforts that are taking place in the context of administrative streamlining," DeStefano said. "We expect the sum of these efforts to yield significant savings and promote a strong financial position, so that the university may continue to support its missions of teaching, research and outreach in the smartest way possible."

KFS's automated workflow processes will route financial transactions to responsible staff members for approval, but allows staff to add "ad hoc" notifications to persons not in the programmed workflow. Project stakeholders consider workflow to be one of KFS's chief benefits, as it will save thousands of hours and dollars and speed up today's cumbersome, sometimes paper-based, manual routing. The system is web-based, with one login for everything. Documents aren't going to be lost in campus mail.

Kuali Day at Cornell, Jan. 13, 2011, will provide staff with the opportunity to hear from DeStefano, campus technical and functional subject matter experts, and two keynote speakers: Brad Wheeler, chairman of the Kuali Foundation's board of directors and Indiana University's vice president of information technologies and chief information officer; and Troy Fluharty, university controller and director of business and financial services for Colorado State University, which implemented KFS in 2009.

Hands-on training is scheduled to begin in April 2011, but several online tutorials are available now at http://www.dfa.cornell.edu/dfa/kfs/training/index.cfm. Video and slides of experts describing workflow, functionality and reporting are at http://www.dfa.cornell.edu/dfa/kfs/presentations/index.cfm.

The origins of Kuali

The Kuali Financial System (KFS) is one of several projects of the Kuali Foundation, a non-profit community of universities, colleges, businesses, and other organizations that have partnered to build and sustain open-source software for higher education. In March 2005 the Mellon Foundation provided $2.5 million to help complete KFS software development. Founding partners are Indiana University, the University of Arizona, the University of Hawaii, Michigan State University, San Joaquin Delta Community College, Cornell University, NACUBO and the rSmart Group.

Along with KFS, the foundation is developing Kuali Coeus for research administration, Kuali Student and the Kuali Open Library Environment.

"Kuali" is a Malaysian word that refers to a cooking utensil -- a small wok -- that is often described as a "humble but essential tool." The description is appropriate for Kuali software, which performs imperative business functions behind the scenes. The culinary reference also is a nod to Sakai, an open-source course and research management tool named after a Japanese chef. The University of Michigan's CHEF (CompreHensive collaborativE Framework) system was the basis for Sakai.