The Research Project Statements (RPS) and Principal Investigator (PI) Dashboards in the McMaster Business Intelligence Tool are now accessible to all PIs and their delegates.

July 2019 saw a launch of the RPS and PI Dashboards to a group of department administrators, research accountants and some PIs, following a softer launch to members of the researcher focus group and others in May 2019.

Martin Gibala, chair of the Department of Kinesiology had the following to say about the new dashboards: “Having sat on one of the stakeholder committees, I can attest to the considerable time and effort that IRA invested in the development of the new PI Dashboard and Research Project Statement. The new tools reflect the close coordination that occurred with user groups across campus, and afford considerably enhanced functionality, new ease-of-use features, and customization options.”

The new dashboards incorporate many changes and improvements requested as a result of the Functional Review of McMaster Financial Support Activities and much consultation and feedback from stakeholder and user groups. The new enhancements and features include:

• A new summary report that makes it easy to view balances for all your projects at once.
• Labour distribution reports to allow users to easily understand who they are paying and from which projects.
• A re-creation of the current Research Project Statement with enhancements, such as additional information on expenses on drilling down.
• The ability to track sponsor funding that has been invoiced but not yet received using the accounts receivable billing module.
• The ability to customize reports by applying filters or changing the layout of tables.
• An easy save feature and the option to set your own defaults. For example, you can customize and save your preferences for a selected group of principal investigators, projects or sponsors.
• Easy export functionality to download reports to Excel, CSV, PDF and more.
• Emailed month-end summary reports to PIs.

“The new RPS is very capable, now exceeding the functionality that was previously available and providing much more ready access to all of our financial information and backup for it in one place,” says Rafael Kleiman of the Department of Engineering Physics, another member of the researcher focus group.  Kleiman encourages the research community to use the new tool saying, “Only if people use the new tools, really engage with them and provide feedback can we continue to make improvements.”

If you have questions concerning the BI/Analytics Program or training, please contact Susanne Janisch, executive assistant, Institutional Research and Analysis at cr_eaira@mcmaster.ca. To request access to the PI Dashboard or Research Project Statement, please contact Sam Petryk at petrykss@mcmaster.ca.