dFac User Guide

What is dFac?

dFac is a faculty appointments management tool in the Duke@Work portal at https://work.duke.edu/. dFac contains faculty appointments, leaves, tenure data, and other faculty information such as education, training, board certifications, evaluation tracking, and professorships.

The purpose of dFac is to streamline the processes for hiring new faculty members and managing faculty appointments. Once new appointments or memberships are proposed, Appointments forms are routed to the proper approval steps based on the faculty member’s rank and Duke organization.

dFac centralizes faculty leave and flexible work arrangements requests and tracks form approvals, as well as displays tenure and sabbatical data. dFac enables users to customize a faculty member’s online directory title and prioritize multiple titles for other systems including Scholars@Duke.

dFac History

dFac was rolled out in December 2009. The data for existing faculty initially loaded was a combination of SAP, FMS, and FPS data. Employee data such as position information, payroll information, and addresses, came from SAP. Faculty appointments, education data, professional experience, tenure information, and named professorships came from FPS for medical faculty and FMS for university faculty. All leave records were loaded from FMS, which was the official source of leave data. Any faculty hired after dFac was implemented had appointment data entered directly into dFac.

Before dFac, faculty positions and appointments were managed separately. Position information came from iForms/SAP and appointments came from FMS and FPS. Now appointments are created in dFac and positions are created and maintained in iForms/SAP.

Non-regular rank university faculty were not tracked in FMS so there is very limited data for non-regular rank faculty who were at Duke before the dFac rollout. Editing these faculty will force the input of required data, so when you are working with non-regular rank university faculty, dFac may request that you fill in the required fields before you exit a form.

dFac is maintained in the Provost’s Office by the Office of Faculty Affairs Administration.

Questions and Support

Refer to the dFac home page, on https://work.duke.edu, for more resources and information about getting help. Please contact the local dFac administrators in your dean's office for general Help and “how-to” questions. If you identify a system problem, please submit a Help ticket to the dFac support team. Help tickets can be created from the dFac Home page using the “Get Help Now” link.
Please include the following information:

• What were the steps that you took to lead to the problem?
• What is the specific wording of the error message?
• What’s the faculty member’s name, Duke Unique ID, and position number?
• Which kind of dFac form were you working with and what is the form notification number?

The more information you provide with your request, the easier it will be to troubleshoot the problem.

Who are the Faculty?

Duke faculty members teach classes, do research, care for patients, hold administrative positions, and serve many other functions. dFac contains data for all Duke faculty members: tenured, tenure-track, other regular rank, non-regular rank, emeritus, and bargaining unit.

In order to be viewable in dFac, a person’s position must be classified with one of the following faculty personnel subareas (PSAs). Only faculty members with the following PSAs are visible in dFac.
Personnel Subarea (PSA) with Description

• Exempt Faculty are individuals with a staff affiliation and position job code and a non-regular rank primary faculty appointment.

Depending on your permissions, you may not be able to see faculty on the confidential payroll, that is, whose positions are in confidential organizations. Only certain users in central administrative offices can see faculty on the confidential payroll. For more information, please contact the Provost’s office or the School of Medicine APT office.

Positions vs. Appointments: What’s the Difference?

To understand dFac, it’s important to understand that faculty can have both positions and appointments:

• Positions define the employee relationship with Duke and exist for the payroll system. All Duke employees are hired into a position. A position has a position number such as 50001234, a Personnel Subarea (PSA) such as 009, a job code such as 1547, a title such as Assistant Professor, and an organization such as Chemistry.
• Appointments define the faculty rank and are given only to faculty members. All faculty should have a primary appointment; some faculty also have secondary, joint, or administrative appointments. Appointments also have job codes, titles, and organizations, just as positions do. An example of a primary appointment title is Assistant Professor in Chemistry, which is job code 1547. When assigning an appointment, ensure the appointment job code aligns with the position job code.

dFac helps keep position and appointments information in sync as faculty are hired, promoted, or transferred.

Navigate the dFac Homepage

Once on the dFac Homepage you have several options. At the top of the homepage is a toolbar where you can access:

… forms and individual faculty data

…appointments eligible for batch reappointment

… faculty annual review dates

…data reporting options

… a list of in progress and completed forms

On the right are links to this guide and other helpful documents, as well as the dFac Wiki (listed here as dFac User Support Resources).

On the left are shortcuts to other helpful Duke resources such as the Faculty Handbook and the School of Medicine APT office.