Modernization of Financial Reporting (MFR) Project Update

July 14, 2016

Detail Listing Outreach Survey—thanks for sharing your thoughts and opinions!!

Last month, more than 500 individuals completed an online survey to provide specifics about their use of the Detail Listing CREW report and how to best address their needs with the future design of the OBI Detail Transaction Listing (DTL) dashboard.  The Finance Working Group believes in the importance of end users having a say in the redesign of the CREW reports and the findings from this survey represent the voices of that user community.

The survey findings were rich with interesting and useful information.  If you’re interested in exploring all the results of the survey, you will find the report posted on the MFR project wiki.  Almost 200 individuals shared their specific ideas about what needs to be addressed in the future design.  The good news is that many of these items are existing OBI functionality or are already being considered by the MFR project team, Finance Working Group and sub-committees.  We thought we’d share some of the details and hopefully allay some of the more common concerns or misconceptions that users may have.

Top Ten User Suggested Topics for the Detail Listing Redesign

Topic What's Being Done
1. Formatting—Want ability to bring in additional fields or omit certain columns. In OBI, a user can exclude columns not relevant to them and save that view for future use.  In addition, the future DTL will have additional columns a user may choose to include.  The subcommittee is currently defining these fields, but they will include all chart value descriptions and journals created by HUID/name.
2.  Manipulating Data—Need to be able to use macros and pivot tables to view report contents.

Users can easily export data from OBI to Excel for use with pivot tables and macros. For locally developed macros, there are three general scenarios:

  1. Users can easily customize the format of OBI reports (see above) to allow their macros to work as they do today;
  2. The rich user experience of OBI will eliminate the need for some macros – some users will be able to do their work right in OBI; or
  3. In some cases, users may need to update their macros to work based on the new dashboards in OBI.
3. System Clarity—Need Descriptions 1, 2 and 3 Users will be able to get all the same data (and more!) from the new OBI DTL Dashboard, however all column names will reflect the data in that column and there will be no more “Descriptions 1, 2 and 3”. Every field in OBI will be broken out into separate columns with meaningful labels that help users understand what they represent (PO number, HUID, Vendor Name).  Now, users can get object code descriptions as well. 
4. Report Parameters—Want the ability to set defaults so that users do not have to slog through a lot of data that they don’t need. See #1 above.  Users will customize and set up dashboards to get the data they need. Changing parameters and re-running the dashboard to access different data is easy – most OBI dashboards run in well under a minute.
5. CSV and PDF options—Must be able to produce output in both formats. Yes, yes, 100% yes!!!  Users will be able to produce dashboards in both formats.  Even better, they will be able to export directly to Excel which means they will not lose the leading zeros in cells.  
6. Data Clarity—Need Object Code Description. Object Code Description will now be a column that users may opt to include in their output.
7. Simplicity—Want to limit the number of descriptions; keep it simple. We agree -- simplicity is key. Sometimes less really is more.  As we proceed through design, the pilot users are being asked to focus on what the default output should look like.  As we noted in item #1, users will have the ability to customize their default output so they won’t have to delete the same columns every time.
8. Access—Who can access dashboards and their content is very important. Absolutely. The project is using a robust engagement process to guide the development of the solution for data access controls.
9. Scheduling—Need to schedule and run multiple reports on a regular basis. OBI offers strong scheduling capabilities, and many other features that differ from scheduling today. There are many design and maintenance considerations that we are working through to determine the features to deploy – stay tuned!
10. Speed—Need the reports to run quickly. Just say “No!” to getting up to make a coffee while your report runs.  The vast majority of OBI dashboards run in well under a minute.  

IMPORTANT REMINDER:

CREW Grants Management reports are expected to be decommissioned on November 1, 2016. 

At that time, these CREW reports will be disabled and OBI will be the sole source for this information.  During the transition period through the end of October, the Grants Management reports will be available in both CREW and OBI. 

Grants Management Dashboards—new release complete and training on its way

As of July 1st, there’s a new release in Production for Grants Management dashboard users to access.  Major modifications to the Current and Historical Grants Financials dashboards were introduced, including the addition of subactivity and Principal Investigator in the prompts, freezing of the column headers, and removing the sectioning and subtotals from the default view of the pages.  Modifications were also made to the Invalid Code Combinations dashboard, including an automatic rendering of the university-wide results.  Thirteen features were included in the release; please refer to the release notes for all the details.

End user training sessions begin later this month and continue through October.  The instructor-led course is being taught by a team of individuals representing a variety of schools and the Office of Sponsored Programs (OSP).  Further details will also be posted on the Office for Sponsored Projects website. For exact dates, please see the OBI Grants training calendar.   More sessions will be added later this summer, so please check back and enroll in a session that works with your schedule.  Or, if you have questions, reach out to your Engagement Councils or your LIM (Local Implementation Manager.  Please remember that if you are new to OBI, you will need to take the general OBI Tools Training before you can attend the OBI Grants training.