Payroll/Personnel System (PPS)

 

Description

The Payroll/Personnel System (PPS) is centrally maintained but operated individually by each campus. PPS is the university's human resources and payroll system and contains a wide variety of employee demographic, employment, and payroll data, both current and historical. The primary purpose of PPS is to ensure that all employees are paid properly and in a timely fashion and to support payroll-related reporting requirements of both the university and external agencies.

A team of programmers at UCOP maintains PPS. This team functions as a software vendor, making changes to the "base" version of PPS and distributing these changes to each location. The campus is responsible for the integration of the changes into its local operational PPS. Campuses are permitted to make local changes to PPS within a set of guidelines that ensures that local changes do not compromise the integrity of the system or jeopardize correct and timely payment to all employees, and that they implement UC Human Resources policy uniformly.

Employees are the ultimate customers of PPS, but the users are campus central office personnel (e.g., payroll, human resources, benefits) as well as departmental personnel assistants and other authorized campus staff.

Access

PPS is accessed primarily through a batch interface or through an online interface. The online interface is currently through CICS, although a Web-based browser interface is available for some functions.

Technical Information

PPS runs in an IBM mainframe environment using the MVS operating system. Data are stored in DB2 databases, with system programs written in COBOL. The EDB Web Inquiry portion of the system uses Net.Data scripting language. New Web functionality is being developed with J2EE/Java Web Sphere technologies. As mentioned earlier, each campus is responsible for operating its own PPS production environment. Two campuses (Berkeley and Los Angeles) operate their own mainframe environments. Merced is run as part of the Los Angeles PPS. The remaining seven campuses (Davis, Irvine, Riverside, San Diego, San Francisco, Santa Barbara, and Santa Cruz) all run their production installations on the UCOP mainframe.