Eastern’s information system upgrade is ahead of schedule and will soon bring biweekly paychecks for student workers.

Part of the Enterprise Information System Enhancement project, commonly referred to as Banner, will be up and running in January and will distribute student workers’ paychecks every two weeks instead of once a month.

“This is something students have asked for, for some time,” said Bill Witsman, EISE project director. “We knew it would be very difficult to do on the current software so we wanted to make that change with Banner.”

Also, more benefits and paycheck information will also be accessible to employees via the Web through Banner.

“They’ll be able to see a little bit more information,” Witsman said.

Another change students will soon see because of Banner is a different course registration process. Summer registration will be done in early March with the current system, but fall registration will occur a few weeks later with an updated system.

Witsman said the changes should be easy for students to learn. Details about the change will be included in the Fall 2007 course listing published in The Daily Eastern News.

The new registration system, like most systems updated by Banner, should be more efficient, Witsman said.

“Within all of these banner systems, we’ll have increased efficiency within all our offices in campus,” he said.

The new financial aid module should also be put into use this spring and should be used to process financial aid for the 2007 fall semester.

“That part of the project is going real well,” Witsman said. “They’ve got that system build pretty well complete.”

But all the modules are still being tested and cleaned up.

“The next seven months are the most active and probably the most critical for the entire project,” Witsman said. As the modules are put into use, they’ll have to be tested and cleaned up along the way.

While there’s still a lot to get done, Witsman expects the project to be finished before the March 2008 deadline. The Alumni, Advancement and the student information modules will still need some work in the Fall 2007 semester, but should lead into the spring with mainly cleanup work to be done.