Jeanne H. Morgan

In just two years Jeanne H. Morgan helped bring an important process of the budget and finance office into the 21st century. Morgan is responsible for automating the Health Science Center’s annual operating budget "work-paper" process—a process that for 25 years was dreaded and considered labor intensive, but that is vital to ensuring that all Health Science Center employees get paid on time.

Robert H. Flannery, budget officer in the budget and finance office, nominated Morgan for the Employee Excellence in Service Award. He said automation of the budget "work-paper" process had long been on a waiting list of major projects.

"On her own initiative, Jeanne set out to improve the process, working above and beyond her normal duties," he said. "She developed advanced skills to work with Excel spreadsheets and worked with a number of departmental administrators to design a spreadsheet that would be easy for the departments to use and still give the necessary data."

Not only did Morgan revise and improve the process, she also developed and conducted workshops to train departmental personnel on how to use the new process. Her paperlejss process saved the budget and finance office and the entire Health Science Center thousands of dollars in time, energy, equipment and resources.

Judy Murphy, executive assistant in the medical dean’s office, said Morgan’s new process saved her countless hours of having to manually check paper budgets during budget processes.

"I am very confident that the reports I prepare for the dean are more reliable now than in the past," said Murphy. "Jeanne helped save trees, time and my back as well, and for that I’m very thankful."

Diana Hottle, assistant to the director of the Institute of Biotechnology, agreed.

"The new system is far more efficient. The fact that there are no carbons to deal with and the ability to make corrections and automated calculations makes it so much easier."