University Services presents 1997 Service Excellence Awards

The Division of University Services presented its 1997 Service Excellence Awards on March 25, recognizing University Service employees who have undertaken initiatives that advance the division's mission to provide high-quality service in an effective, efficient and environmentally responsible manner that will enable the university to meet its teaching, research and public-service missions.

Two categories of projects were recognized: large-scale and limited-scale. Teams were nominated for completing projects or activities that improve the quality of service of one or more units by improving efficiency or productivity; saving time or money; reducing bureaucracy; meeting specific customer needs, and improving staff morale, cooperation and understanding.

Special consideration was given to projects that resulted from a benchmarking process, used cross-functional teams, demonstrated a creative use of technology, improved the culture or climate of a unit as a whole or made a significant impact on the university's customers.

The Classroom Technology Project tied for first place among large-scale projects. Staff from Computing and Information Technology's Academic Services and Operational Support Services collaborated with University Facilities and the provost's office to provide 26 classrooms with permanently installed computer and video-projection equipment. The Digital Libraries Initiative also received first-place honors for large-scale projects. The plan was initiated by the University Libraries in response to the demand for access to digital and electronic scholarly and general-information resources.

The Procurement Card program received second-place honors among large-scale projects. The card provides a simple and more cost-effective method of purchasing low-cost items because card holders are able to make purchases of $500 or less-74 percent of all purchases made by the university-directly from the supplier without excessive delays and paperwork.

The ADAMS Conversion Project tied for first place among limited-scale projects. It was initiated by WBFO and the Office of University Development, which collaborated to customize a section of the ADAMS donor database to enable WBFO to focus on and analyze information pertaining to its subgroup of university friends and alumni. Also receiving first-place honors for limited-scale projects was the CIT System Notification and Information Project, initiated to provide a Web-based application to facilitate formulation and posting of notices on performance or outage problems on CIT-provided electronic or computing services.

The Health Sciences Library Journal Database tied for second place. Developed to collect ongoing usage information for the current journal collection at the Health Sciences Library, the project allows the library to collect and analyze usage data on subscribed journals to allow it to best allocate acquisition funding.

The Professional School Transcripts project also received second-place honors. The system retrieves transcript information directly from UB InfoSource and allows a department to produce a visually appealing transcript, printed on secure paper, within minutes.