MFR Stats
- During the month of July 2017, 303 distinct users ran financial dashboards in OBI.
- During the month of July 2017, 24,772 distinct requests were made using the financial dashboards, almost half of which were made of the Transaction Listing All dashboard at 10,608 requests.
- We have 137 individuals registered for the Introduction to OBI Financial Dashboard training and 422 who have completed training, which is 1/3 of the way to our training target of 75% of all OBI users of the financial dashboards.
Project Update
The MFR Project’s primary focus is to address showstoppers identified by the Finance Working Group and to improve system performance overall, especially the Transaction Listing and Transaction Listing with Balance Forward dashboards. With recent changes, performance for these dashboards has improved and most requests are completing in under 5 minutes. Further improvements will be delivered in upcoming releases.
The next release will begin on Thursday, August 24 at 6pm and OBI will be down during this time. We expect the release to be complete and OBI accessible by 9am on Friday, August 25. The Project Team will be addressing ~5 showstoppers with the August release. Please refer to the Release Notes for detailed information.
All items identified as a showstopper must be addressed before we decommission the CREW reports. At this time, the MFR Project is preparing for the decommissioning of the CREW application and the web-based version of Interactive Reporting (IR) to occur on November 1st. At that time OBI will serve as the primary source for financial reporting. Until November 1, financial reports will be available in both CREW and OBI. There will be no changes to the desktop version of Interactive Reporting (also known as BRIO or Hyperion Interactive Reporting Studio) at that time. Users of IR/BRIO will be still be able to use the desktop version for their ad hoc reporting needs.
Training
The MFR Project Team continues to deliver Instructor Led Training (ILT) on the OBI Financials dashboards to schools and departments. Users can view availability of training sessions through the Harvard Training Portal or the OBI Training Calendar.
Weekly webinars for each of the 19 financial dashboards are also available to users as a resource for learning more about the new dashboards. These webinars are the main source of training for those dashboards not covered in ILT. Key dates and topics for upcoming webinars are as follows:
- Thursday, August 17, 10 am: Fund Management (replaces the following CREW reports: FGUUBR, Fund Summary, and Loans Fund Summary)
- Thursday, August 24, 10 am: GL Account Monitoring (replaces the following CREW reports: Summary Actuals, Summaries Actual and Budget, Treasury Report – All Moneys, and Treasury Report – Fund Type)
- Thursday, August 31, 10 am: Journals General (replaces the Journals – General CREW report)
- Thursday, September 7, 10 am: Balance Sheet (replaces the Balance Sheet CREW report)
- Thursday, September 14, 10 am: Endowment Management (replaces the following CREW reports: Total Fund Principal and Units, Unit Run Report, and Standing Order Summary)
More information on the webinars can be found on the OBI Training Calendar. OBI Financials ILT will also be supported by OBI Drop-In Hours held twice a month until October (see the OBI Training Calendar for details), and readily accessible online simulations and job aids.
If you have questions about the MFR Project, please visit the MFR Wiki or reach out to your Local Implementation Manager.