Guest Blogger Series - Alison Wellman Smith from HUIT: OBI and GMAS – A Match Made in Reporting Heaven

Thank you to the Research Administration Services team for asking me to be a guest blogger!  I hope I’ll be able to provide you with a bit more information about how the new reporting tool, Oracle Business Intelligence (OBI) can supplement all the great information you can find in GMAS.

For my first topic, I thought I would share a little behind-the-scenes info about where OBI gets its information.  OBI has data fed from all the same places as the Common Reporting Environment for the Warehouse (CREW).  OBI and GMAS both collect financial information from the General Ledger, which is the central repository for transactions from Harvard’s financial applications.  The General Ledger includes information from PCard, HCOM, Web Reimbursement, Accounts Payable, and Payroll.  The information in OBI and GMAS also include manual journals, which are entries directly in the General Ledger.  The sponsored information in OBI pulls from the GMAS tables in the General Ledger.  

Data is fed from the General Ledger on a nightly basis, just like it does for CREW and GMAS.  This process means that a user is always reviewing data that is up-to-date as of the night before; there is a one-day lag in the information.  For example, if you review the Invalid Code Combination dashboard and process a journal to correct one of the invalid code combinations, you will notice that the invalid coding has been removed from the dashboard the very next day.

The caveat to this statement is the three Grants Financial dashboards (CREW Period Expense Report replacement).  In these dashboards, you will see expense, income, and budget information for three different time frames.  There is a note on each of the dashboards explaining the differences between the new column titles.  (More to come on this with my next blog post on budgets in GMAS and OBI Grants Management dashboards.)

Additionally, your security for the Grants Management folder in OBI is also based on the security you have in GMAS.  Whatever projects you can see in GMAS, you should be able to report on them using the Grants Management dashboards in OBI.  So not only is data readily available to you, you can be assured that you are only seeing your GMAS portfolio!

Happy reporting!