2025-06-24 Merit Appeals Board Minutes

Home

Merit Appeals Board June 24, 2025 So, (inaudible) to take a step back and look at a wholistic approach and seeing if there’s other ways that we can incorporate services for our employees and help them—have that different engagement. Continuous recruitments—we are back down to 48. At one point, during this year, I saw that it went as high as 64. So, we are making progress or, at least, back to holding steady. Some of those 48 positions have historically been very, very difficult to fill and there’s a lot of positions on the continuous list that are being recruited for at multiple levels. So, it may not be actually 48 vacancies, but we recruit at multiple levels to give us the greatest opportunity to find a candidate and then provide training, if needed, to get back up to the permanent class of work. We’re continuing to work really hard on the new ERP software that will replace FRESH. So, the st financial portion, including payroll, goes live on July 1. So that the financial section goes live st on July 1, and then for the human resources portion, we’re going to begin testing shortly because our go live date is January 1, 2026. So, CherryRoad, the Implementor of the Oracle software, was here onsite in April and what I got from attending the in-person sessions with my staff—and then also with the software developers—we had gotten a lot more engagement when we were all in the same room. Most of the meetings that we have—and the meetings can last up to six hours each day, usually Monday through Thursday—and they’re broken down into different segments, so it’s just not one meeting. But we attend all of these virtually because the software developers are spread across the mainland. And then, my staff is—and Finance staff—everybody’s in their respective offices at their computer. And I was noticing a lot of pauses—long pauses where a question was answered and there weren’t responses. And so, after attending the in-person session and I saw how everyone was focused, more engaged—indicating more understanding, really following along noting problems in the design of the software—I told my staff that, from that point forward, we were going to be attending all of the meetings, on our laptops, in the conference room together. So, we all have to look at each other, and talk to each other, and focus on that. I think there’s a lot of benefits to being able to attend meetings virtually and do this development virtually, but it’s very easy to become distracted by your email or trying to do other work. And so, really, for our—the last few months of this push, I felt it was important for everybody to continue that effort to be collaborative in one space and I think that that’s going much better. So, I’m really happy to see people raising questions and concerns. We want this project to be as successful as possible. And so, this next phase, where we do the testing—is going to be instrumental in making sure that we’re able to iron out all the bugs before we go live in January. So, they’ve been working incredibly hard. It’s good to see some of their time freed up but at least there’s not as many Page 12