International travel is improved with Emory’s new Visa corporate card.

The PeopleSoft (PS) Financials Technical Team successfully provided oversight for the lengthy and extremely complicated Credit Card Processing Project.

Led by Elija Pasha (Enterprise Applications), the team worked closely with Haniya Vaid (Emory Financial Operations), who was the primary technical contact for the project.

The Credit Card Processing project involved the difficult change-over from American Express (AMEX) to Visa as Emory’s preferred corporate credit card. The Project ran from the fall of 2011 until the flawless March 2013 go-live.

Instructions on how to get the new corporate card were published back in March.

Vaid’s team changed the interface into PS financials and worked with new vendor JP Morgan Chase (JPMC) to revamp the entire credit card process. Change management was a major factor in the project and the Business Process Improvement (BPI) group was engaged to help implement the new policy. There were several campus meetings, including the Employee Council and the University Senate, to announce the policy changes.

The BPI group, led by project manager Jamie Smith, spearheaded the overall effort. Elijah’s PS Financials Technical Team was comprised of JoAnn Dodson, who was the primary point of contact, and Shoba Mallik (both of Enterprise Applications).

The biggest complaint about AMEX in the past had been that it was not accepted worldwide and Emory had a lot of employees who needed a better card. Now Emory employees may travel internationally with greater monetary capabilities.

The changeover was so complex because of all of the customization needed to match the JPMC standards. The project had a large variety of custom PS objects and required months of extensive testing. The team then spent a whole month practicing implementation because of the number of dependencies. They ran ten dry runs for the changeover and on go-live day experienced no problems.