Finance Organizational Announcement from Steve Murphy

August 12, 2020

On Thursday, August 6, Steve Murphy, Vice President for Finance and Chief Financial Officer, announced organizational changes at a Finance All-Hands meeting, followed by a memo to the Finance organization.

After an in-depth review of operations initiated in Fall 2019, including 160+ interviews with staff in Finance and in Business Operations, Steve Murphy announced the following:

  • We are retiring the Yale Shared Services (YSS) name and current team structure.
    • The transaction teams for the YSS service areas are moving into the departments responsible for the policy and process.
    • This means the Accounts Payable and Payment Services team is moving into Procurement; and the Payroll team, YSS Tax team, and the Accounting and Financial Services team are moving into the Controller’s Office.
  • By doing this we are integrating staff into teams responsible for the end-to-end lifecycle of a financial process – from policy to transaction.
  • We’re focusing those teams on continuous improvement of our core processes, e.g., procure-to-pay, record-to-report, so they can work together to reduce rework and error rates and improve quality – and increase opportunities for training and career development.
  • This is part of a broader effort in Finance to bring people who do related work together onto the same team, so it’s easier to collaborate and improve processes.

These changes mean:

  • Susannah Gobbi, Chief Procurement Officer, will oversee the Accounts Payable and Payment Services team. This expansion of Susannah’s role will reinforce and facilitate her responsibility for the end-to-end procure-to-pay process.
  • Shannon Smith, University Controller, will oversee the Payroll team, YSS Tax team, and the Accounting and Financial Services team. This expansion of Shannon’s role will reinforce and facilitate her responsibility for the end-to-end record-to-report process.
  • Lauren Storer, Senior Director for Finance Operations and Special Advisor to the Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, will oversee the Finance Support Center (FSC) and YSS P-Card team. The operational review identified the need to create a new team, Finance Operations, with responsibility for a set of activities that cut across other Finance departments, including the FSC, culture, training, and talent development.

The Yale Operations and Business Operations community should not feel any immediate impact. Longer-term, we expect investments in both training and development as well as quality assurance and monitoring will help equip employees for evolving demands, create opportunities for professional development, and strengthen compliance and internal controls.

If you have any questions about these changes, please contact Susannah (susannah.gobbi@yale.edu), Shannon (Shannon.smith@yale.edu), Lauren (lauren.storer@yale.edu), or Steve (stephen.murphy@yale.edu).