Over the past year, our team has made important strides towards building up a culture of service excellence at York. Through strong partnerships, we have identified challenges and worked together to find the solutions that benefit our students, faculty and staff. Some key successes this year include engaging senior leaders to understand the benefits of service excellence, supporting the timely delivery of active projects related to the University Service Centre, Human Resources and Finance and establishing clear shared accountability and ownership of service excellence outcomes with divisions, units and faculties. We're also proud of the work led by the University Services Centre (USC) and Division of Finance & Administration to launch a new USC website, which makes it easier and faster to access staff services.
Our main goal has been to improve existing processes, structures and systems to reduce duplication of effort, improve engagement with services as well as support the long-term financial health of the University. We are thrilled to see the positive impact of our work, from new organizational services for staff, technological improvements, and enhanced processes across the institution.
MARIO VERRILLI
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, SERVICE EXCELLENCE PROGRAM
OUR GOALS
The Service Excellence Program (SEP) collaborates with York’s students, faculty, instructors, staff and external partners to find new ways of improving service quality and efficiency by:
- Establishing clear shared accountability and ownership of service excellence outcomes with faculties and departments.
- Supporting the timely delivery of active projects related to University Services Centre (USC), Human Resources and Finance as defined by milestones.
- Implementing a new project intake and prioritization process.
- Developing and promoting methods, tools and other knowledge resources for broad community application.
- Strengthening York’s culture of service excellence that emphasizes collaboration, feedback, data-informed decision making and continuous improvement.
Improve client satisfaction
Time for what matters
Save effort with streamlined processes
Create efficiencies
Shared accountability and outcomes with faculties and departments
Connecting service providers with users for better service delivery
Improving services begins with strong collaboration and communication between the parties that use and offer services. Service tables were created to offer a forum for both sides to discuss priorities, needs and areas of concern about how services are provided at York.
By the end of 2023-2024, the Service Excellence Program had facilitated two service tables for Human Resources, the University Service Centre, and University Information Technology and offered one for Finance and Budget & Asset Management.
The tables were redesigned to ensure strong levels of engagement. Before groups met, surveys were distributed to the Divisional Senior Administrators group to determine the agenda for each service table to ensure they knew what was most relevant to attendees.
The Service Excellence Program is looking to expand this new service table approach to accommodate other areas including Facilities, Advancement, Research and Innovation and Students Services.
Setting expectations with new service level agreements
Service Level Agreements were put in place to provide a consistent process to deliver quality services while ensuring the accountability of service providers across the University.
New agreements were put in place for Human Resource services and Finance & Budget Asset Management services. The agreements were created to ensure that most community-facing services provided by Budget & Asset Management, Financial Services, Human Resources, and the University Service Centre provide clear references around service ownership, accountability and roles and responsibilities. They also aimed to present a clear, concise, and measurable description of the service being provided to those using the services and align the expected service provision with actual service support and delivery.
The Service Excellence Program is now working to develop service level agreements for other service delivery areas across the university.
Making an impact
1-3
weeks of time saved through automatically generated purchase orders in Sm@rtBuy
20
days saved to refund international students with streamlined processes, eliminating up to 40% of workload for other areas in the University
67
ticketing workflows created to triage, handle, and track service requests to pension & benefits and payroll & records more efficiently
7
service tables facilitated by Service Excellence for HR, Finance, IT and the USC, providing a forum for feedback from executive officers on the quality of administrative services provided to the community
As a client of the USC, I am truly grateful for the implementation of systems and processes that have improved the timing of our payments to vendors, honoraria to one-time guest lecturers, and especially, the improvements made to wire transfers. Anthony’s team in the University Service Centre (USC) have done a remarkable job in streamlining the payment of invoices so I am dealing with far fewer escalations of non-payment issues. The USC was also very helpful in recruiting processes and the services were friendly, professional, efficient, and delivered with speed and subject matter expertise.
Ernest Byers on the Service Excellence Program team assisted our music staff and faculty to improve our booking processes to ensure everyone had better visibility of schedules and stages in event planning, including our communications, performance facilities, and department of music faculty and staff. Most importantly, I have sensed a culture shift of accountability for service and agency for central unit staff that has been generated in the SEP and USC teams. As a client dependent on these services to meet our mission of serving students and faculty, it’s a change I welcome.
— Sally Han, Executive Officer, Office of the Dean, School of the Arts, Media, Performance & Design
Faster service at the University Services Centre, human resources
and finance
New contact centre team supports requests at University Services Centre
A dedicated team of experts was brought together to support centralized requests and free up time for other University Services Centre teams to offer improved services at the University.
This team was brought on board to resolve inquiries and help people get support from the right teams at the right time. Self-service resources were also created to help people resolve requests sooner.
The initial pilot focused on payroll and records and pension and benefits first and would lay the groundwork for the ongoing expansion of this new model and approach for other University Services Centre services.
Streamlined ticketing at the University Services Contact Centre
The Service Excellence Program team worked directly with the University Services Centre to create 67 workflows that enable more efficient triaging, handling, and tracking of service requests issued to pension and benefits and payroll and records.
These workflows leveraged functionality from the Halo ticketing system to streamline, automate, and reduce the manual effort involved with certain steps in various processes.
Improving accounts payable processes through triaged requests
The Service Excellence team worked to better document accounts payable processes through a standard operating procedure manual. This would provide internal teams with greater clarity around how to triage requests to support operational effectiveness as well as the onboarding of new hires.
In total, 75 processes and sub-processes were captured in the manual, where six processes had been undocumented and three needed updating to reflect the most recent changes. Overall, the revised triaging process freed up staff time and effort, while ensuring greater staff satisfaction with process.
Digitizing the purchasing of goods and services at York
Purchase and change order processes at York have often lacked transparency and involved a lot of manual and time-consuming tasks. To address this, the Service Excellence Program worked to streamline and digitize the Purchase Requisition (PR) to Purchase Order (PO) and change order process (PRPO) within the Sm@rtBuy system.
Now, community members can purchase goods and services and have their invoices processed through digitized forms in one spot, with automated workflows to save staff time and effort.
People can now easily track the progress of their requests and new compliance features have been added to ensure all requests align with the Signing Authority Register, eliminating the need for email-based approvals. Purchase orders are also automatically generated in Sm@rtBuy and community members no longer need to wait up to three weeks for this to be processed through Strategic Procurement.
Smoother recruitment and onboarding
Collaborating with Human Resources and People Services at the University Services Centre, the Service Excellence Program team analyzed the University’s recruitment and onboarding processes. Results were shared with the Services Excellence Program Executive Sponsors, the Implementation Team and executive officers across the faculties. The goal of this initiative was to understand the value add of these processes and how they help the university manage talent.
In Partnership with the Organizational Learning and People Excellence teams, the Service Excellence Program team trained People Partners to strengthen business acumen and data analysis – both essential skills to better support clients.
Improving expense reimbursement through community engagement
The Service Excellence team convened and led a comprehensive review and revisioning for expense reimbursement at York. Through a series of workshops held with the community, the team identified 6 improvement recommendations involving operational excellence, training and support, policy and procedures, and systems.
Recommendations are being actioned by University Service Centre and Finance with Service Excellence Program support and this is expected to be completed by the end of 2024 when the focus will then shift to ongoing continuous improvements.
University Services Centre (USC) teams have made great strides to ensure our services become more consistent, efficient and high-quality across the University. This is reflected in the roll-out of a new institution-wide recruitment and onboarding service for non-academic employees, where we’ve reduced the number of administrative steps and shrunk the number of processes down from 700 to 23 best practices. We also launched a new purchase requisition form in Sm@rtBuy that includes dynamic prompts to help people enter information more accurately and track the status of purchase requests and orders online.
The USC Contact Centre allows community members to track their service requests online and access more consistent and efficient service. We also improved technical support for classrooms, including new training videos that help faculty and instructors use equipment in the room and ensuring classroom help desk calls are answered by a live agent during peak periods. All of this work would not be possible without community-wide support and collaboration and we are very appreciative.
— Anthony Barbisan, Assistant Vice-President, University Services Centre
The future of Service Excellence
Setting up a service excellence future
A new project intake and prioritization process was created to ensure that the Service Excellence Program will continue to focus on work that has the greatest institutional impact.
By identifying a set of criteria to assess the relative impact and complexity of kinds of opportunities that are submitted to the Service Excellence Program by the community, the team will be able to better support decision-makers with understanding the potential for return on effort and investment when it comes to solving their service problems. The new process will be shared with the broader community to be transparent about how the team is able to support the community.
New methods, tools and resources for knowledge training
To help senior leaders understand how Service Excellence is evaluated, the team shared benchmarking results dashboards and led drop-in sessions to make sure questions were answered. The team also established UniForum (Cubane) functional level reviews to help senior leaders understand their data, how to improve its reliability, and empowered them with knowledge to support decisions around resource allocation.
The Service Excellence Program team also participated in a 3-hour strategic reflection event to engage in a multi-step process to learn about and amplify their own strengths. The day was internally facilitated by Organizational Learning and People Excellence (OLPE), who enhanced the team’s individual and collective skills and abilities, making plans to continue to realize service excellence strategy activation priorities.
The Service Excellence Program team meets quarterly to review its end-to-end methodology and how to leverage strengths to address challenges at the University. Lean Continuous Improvement workshops are also held to develop innovation and problem-solving capabilities with Human Resources People Partners.
Coaching and creating a plan to improve faculty processes
Working in partnership with the School of Arts, Media, Performance and Design (AMPD), the Service Excellence Program team streamlined some key processes at the School that support time management for staff and faculty deliverables, budgeting, the scheduling of shift workers and engaging the community around upcoming concerts.
A 3-step process improvement approach was taken with facilities, faculty members and administration to create a 6-month plan that ensures the AMPD community can make better use of technology, reporting and communication to support all of these functions at the School.