DASH

What is the University of Tennessee’s DASH Program?

After two decades of service, the University of Tennessee’s Systems Applications and Products platform—known throughout the university as IRIS—will no longer be supported. Given the central role that IRIS plays in processing all of UT’s financial and human resources activities, UT officials began planning in 2019 for the transition to a new, cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, known as DASH (Dynamic Administrative Systems for Higher Ed). We are working toward a systemwide go live of finance, human resources, and payroll, with a limited deployment of facilities maintenance to two campuses in January of 2025.

What are we doing now?

In September 2024, the DASH Project moved forward as planned with the launch of User Acceptance Testing (UAT) and the Training Plan. 

As part of UAT, the project is conducting thorough and comprehensive testing to provide an opportunity to validate the employee experience, functionality, usability, and performance of DASH. UAT will take place from September through November with both in-person and virtual sessions across all DASH process areas. UAT participants include project team members and Subject Matter Experts that represent each campus/institute. 

The Training Plan officially kicked off on September 5, 2024, with a DASH Training Town Hall that highlighted DASH training opportunities and plans. UT employees will receive varied training opportunities across different modalities to best support them in preparing for the transition to DASH in January 2025.  

Project in Review

• UT and Accenture partnered in reviewing 24 process and 159 sub-process areas in finance, human resources and payroll for our Business Process Reimagination. About 300 employees systemwide participated in reviewing and reimagining current and future work processes.
• Accenture was selected through a publicly competitive process as the system integration partner for the DASH ERP implementation project.
• The initial Chart of Accounts engagement included defining the structure of the financial chart of accounts, serving as an accelerator as the Project enters the design/blueprint phase for financial workstreams. The final set of actual values will not be solidified for some time, as segments and values may continue to be refined during the design phase.
• The Design/Blueprint phase was completed in February 2023, as process, technical, and other non-functional requirements and design were identified to confirm the scope of the project.
• The Adopt and Adapt phase was completed in August 2023, as over 500 project team members from across the state participated in more than 100 prototype sessions to vet UT business processes in the University’s own Oracle environment. Valuable feedback and insight were being captured throughout this phase to refine the solution and confirm the design of DASH.
• The Validate phase consists of rigorous testing to ensure functional and technical requirements are met and to ensure the system is working as designed, performing multiple rounds of mock data conversions and cleansing to yield high-quality data.
• DASH will launch in January 2025, and will improve our users’ experiences and allow us to be more agile and dynamic in our finance, human resource and payroll functions.

Thank you, Governor Lee and Legislators

The Tennessee General Assembly passed a historic budget in April 2021. Among other items, it allocated $50 million nonrecurring for UT System and $120 million nonrecurring for other public universities to assist with implementing a new enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution. Thank you to our legislators and Governor Bill Lee for making this important investment in public universities across our state. This key investment will transform the way we do business. Click the “Benefits” URL on the left to view the anticipated benefits and why UT is proceeding with this change.