Customer Spotlight: Brad West
College/Unit: University Budget Office
Describe what you and/or your team does at UK.
Our team at the budget office provides the University community the following services:
Institution-wide financial and resource analysis and planning
Developing, implementing and monitoring the annual operating and capital budgets
Developing the biennial operating and capital budget requests as part of the state biennial budget process
Coordinating, developing and submitting the University’s six-year capital plan as part of the state’s capital planning process
Analyzing data and research issues, as requested.
In terms of my contribution to the team, the majority of my time is spent on research, analysis and forecasting of financial, human resource or student data for financial impacts to the University. Other responsibilities include Fiscal Leadership of the President and EVPFA Areas, Management of Enterprise Systems such as our Axiom Tuition Modeling tool and special projects such as assisting in implementing the new budget tool.
Talk about the ways you’ve collaborated with ITS and how it impacted your work.
In my position, I’ve worked on several special projects with ITS mainly with the Enterprise Applications (EA) office but I also work very closely with the business office through my primary functions. I’ve enjoyed getting to know many of the team members in EA in preparing for Tableau and understanding how the data is put together to better assist the business officers around the university. In late 2019 and 2020, I worked with several members of the EA on implementing a tuition modeling program for use during the budget process. This was designed to help streamline the estimation and forecasting process. We had a pretty significant change though and we will be ramping up changing our model again this fall/winter/spring. Our office has also worked with the Finance and Admin (F&A) department in EA on getting up to speed on some Tableau functionality and reporting since it will ultimately be replacing the BW tools we have. It’s a necessary growing pain since our old system is being upgraded but the F&A team is wonderful to collaborate with on these projects. Weekly (and sometimes daily), I will work with the business office staff to assist on issues they are experiencing from escalating matters or just talking through some initiative and planning out the process. Overall, my experience with ITS has been a positive one and I look forward to continuing our projects in the future.