We are pleased to announce the deployment of the EPICS (Employees Position Information Collaborative System) program. The first districts to pilot the system for BEST NET and the statewide JPA CECC (The California Educational Computer Consortium) were the Alta Loma School District, The Ontario-Montclair School District and the Yucaipa Calimesa Joint Unified School District.

These districts began using the system on March 25th and provided an invaluable service by thoroughly testing the application on behalf of all districts in the county and state-wide.

Nineteen other BEST NET districts implemented the system in early May, after a one-day overview session. EPICS provided such an easy transition from the old personnel system (PC2000), that a lengthy and complex conversion and implementation process was not necessary.

The EPICS application uses web-based technology and runs off of Internet Explorer (IE) 6.0 or greater. The system performance is greatly enhanced and provides many new features including quick data entry. Some of the new features of EPICS are:
1) The consolidated Employee Maintenance Page (ten programs combined into one data entry page)
2) Process Driven Data Entry
3) Advanced Search Options
4) Export Capabilities
5) U.S. Postal Validation
6) SSN Validation
7) Notice of Assignment (Contract) Forms
8) NCLB Maintenance Sections
9) CALPADS Reporting requirements related to Ethnicity & Race

The application is receiving rave reviews by the end users. On any given day, there are estimates of up to 100 users accessing the system. Comments received include that the users appreciate:
1) Having all of the employee’s maintenance work contained on one page,
2) Collecting and reporting of NCLB data from within the application,
3) Ease of moving a person from one position to another on the Position Transfer Screen,
4) The increased speed of being able to get their job done more quickly on any given day.

Staff will be working with several CECC counties over the next year to deploy EPICS statewide.

The new features yet to be deployed with the EPICS project is the new Personnel Action Form (PAF) process, a Leave of Absence Process, the Salary Schedule module as well as a Flex Calendar module. If all goes as planned, these modules are all slated to be deployed in the late Fall/early Winter timeframe.