The Modernization of Financial Reporting Project is charged with replacing the existing CREW Financials and Grants Management content with Oracle Business Intelligence (OBI) dashboards.
Recent Accomplishments
In partnership with our business owners on the Grants Working Group (GWG), the team delivered 8 new dashboards in the Grant Management subject area. This release is significant in that the team was able to add many enhancements to enable the content to be much more than just a replacement of the CREW reports. These new dashboards provide valuable information to our user communities in pre-award offices, post-award offices and financial offices and have been piloted with approximately 100 users throughout the University. They are now in production and available, and each school-based Engagement Council is currently determining a local roll-out strategy.
The GWG and project team are currently testing the OBI version of the PER (we are calling this the "Grants Financial Dashboard") which we will be piloting later this quarter. The plan is to have this available for school adoption in early April.
The project team is targeting November 1, 2016 to decommission the existing CREW Grants Management content. The project team will be vetting this date with engagement councils to confirm that the timeline allows for a reasonable conversion period.
Current Work in Progress
The team is currently focused on the planning and implementation to convert the General Ledger and Budgeting content. The team has established a Finance Working Group to serve as our business owners of this content as well as identified 4 subcommittees to define the user requirements on the Detail Listing, Budget, Interim and GAAP, and Fund-based reports. Given that the detail listing report is relied on so heavily within our community, the project team will conduct outreach sessions throughout the University to solicit input on how you use this report today. Stay tuned as there will be more to come on that in weeks ahead!
We anticipate the General Ledger, Budget and Detail Listing dashboards will be available to some members of the Finance community in late summer/fall of 2016 and do not yet have a proposed date to decommission this CREW content.
Role of Schools
Engagement Councils continue to function very effectively in helping facilitate smooth deployment and adoption of the OBI Tool in each respective area. Co-chaired by the Local Implementation Managers (LIMs) and the Financial Dean, the Engagement Councils are actively engaged with the project by facilitating the completion of usability testing, determining specific process changes for their areas, and communicating with end users. Please contact a member of your Engagement Council if you have any questions. For other users within your schools or units who are interested in learning more, the MFR Wiki provides a wealth of information and tools, including project news, project training information, FAQS, simulations, dashboard catalogs and support information.
User Training
Users must successfully complete our online or instructor-led OBI Training course and must also become certified for OBI by a local authorized requestor in order to be granted access to the OBI tool. The OBI Tools Training Online Course is a 45-minute online tutorial designed to introduce new OBI users to the core functionality of the OBI Tool. Users can also sign up (via PeopleSoft class FSS170) for the OBI Tools Instructor-Led Training, which is a one-hour, hands-on session. The Online Resources section of the project wiki provides additional documentation and training resources.
The MFR team, in conjunction with the schools, central offices, and CWD are assessing the needs and available resources for content training on the grants and financial dashboards.
Questions
Please contact a member of your Engagement Council if you have any questions on the MFR Project.