IT update | SAP
Email sent to all staff on Thursday 20 October by Rachel Brealey, Chief Operating Officer.
Dear colleagues,
A power issue on Tuesday 18 October caused a problem with SAP. This is the main University system that is used by our finance, purchasing, human resources and student management processes.
We apologise for the inconvenience this has caused for both our staff and student communities. Our teams are continuing to work today to restore the service as quickly as possible. While SAP remains unavailable, several services will be affected, including the following:
- Purchasing – You will not be able to create new requisitions (SIPR). Please delay raising requisitions until next week, if possible. To view details of our emergency procedure for requisitioning goods and services, please visit our Purchasing site.
- Supplier payments – Scheduled payments to suppliers have not been made this week due to the outage, but we anticipate payments to be made next week.
- Employee and Management Self Service (ESS/MSS), the system where you can view your payslips and make a request for annual leave, is currently unavailable.
- You will not be able to book on OD&PL and other training courses, or complete the Information Governance training.
- Expenses payments – Expenses have been paid this week, however there may be some impact on payment of expenses next week.
- Research systems KRISTAL and SOLAR will continue to be unavailable until SAP is restored. For urgent costings, please use SiriusWeb and the Estates Cost Calculator spreadsheets. For urgent contracts, please email any mitigating actions and approvals to the relevant contacts.
- New members of staff may find they are unable to make full use of Banner, Minerva, GRAD, LCMM (Lecture Capture), Web, StREAM and Zoom.
- Class lists – Staff may not be able to view their class lists in attendance monitoring. You can request a class list report from the timetabling team, however, please be mindful that there is a delay due to the large volume of student queries.
Impact on students
- Registration – For the small minority of students that have not already registered, they will not be able to complete registration whilst the system remains unavailable. For some of them, this will also mean that we cannot confirm their registration to the Student Loans Company for payment of the maintenance loan.
- Student expenses payments – Expenses have been paid this week, however there will be no payment of expenses next week.
- Timetable – Any module enrolments or programme changes from Tuesday 18 October will not appear on students’ timetables. Students should use the ‘MyTimetable’ function on Minerva to access module timetables to find the times and locations of their lectures. Students should not attend smaller group teaching (e.g. labs and some seminars) until they have been assigned to a group on their timetable.
As the team works to restore the system, you may receive notifications from SAP. However, please do not log in to the system as it is not yet available for general use.
For a full list of all affected services, visit our IT status page. Please note that we have also sent an email to students sharing the impact of this ongoing issue and will provide a further update tomorrow, Friday 21 October.
Please signpost any students concerned about payments or financial hardship to the Student information Service. Students can also visit Help & Support in Leeds University Union.
With best wishes,
Rachel
Rachel Brealey
Chief Operating Officer