GMAS May 2017 Release Communications Survey

Please take a moment to complete a brief survey about how we did communicating the latest GMAS release. Data from this survey will help us determine the best forms of communication for future releases. This link will also be available on the GMAS homepage, but feel free to share this survey link with those in your areas who may not log into GMAS often, or who do not subscribe to this blog.

Thank you for your anticipated participation...

Oracle Financials Systems will be having a Release Outage beginning on Friday, 4/21 at 6pm through Wednesday, 4/26 at 9am.

This will result in GMAS not having up to date financial information on Monday, 4/24 and Tuesday, 4/25 due to the unavailability of the Financials Data Warehouse.  We will have fresh data on Wednesday, 4/26 but it may be delayed because of final validation by Harvard Data Warehouse (HDW) staff.

We will continue to get updates from the HR Data Warehouse during this time period.

Please communicate this throughout your school/...

Thank you so much for reading my blogs and for the interest these past weeks!  We have received some great questions as a result.  We thought we’d share the Q&A with everyone – hope this helps!  If you have other questions, please email the Help Desk at ITHelp@harvard.edu.  Your emails will go to the OBI project team.

Lets say you took a break from research admin for a bit and when you came back, CREW was gone and OBI is here.  What are the top reports you would tell a n00b to run?

The top grants dashboards I would...

Given the wonderful new process to upload sponsored budget to the General Ledger in GMAS, I wanted to take a second to talk about how OBI works with the GL Sponsored Budgets.  GL Sponsored Budgets can be found in a few different OBI dashboards: Sponsored Accounts, Current Grants Financial, Historical Grants Financial, and Printable Grants Financial dashboards.

The Sponsored Accounts dashboard provides expense, income, and budget information at the subactivity, or 33-digit, level.  There are two budget-related columns in this dashboard: Current GL Sponsored Budget and Budget...

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...

Over the span of the next couple weeks, we will be welcoming our second guest blogger Alison Wellman Smith. Alison is a Business Analyst, focusing on the Grants Dashboards on the MFR project in HUIT. Alison began her career in sponsored research a little over thirteen years ago at Brigham and Women’s Hospital where her responsibilities focused on both pre and post award. From BWH, she transitioned into a post award role in the Office for Sponsored Programs here at Harvard. After six years in OSP, Alison took a position at the Harvard Kennedy School where her focus was on post award,...

As part of updating the GMAS homepage, there is a new search box at the top of the screen that allows you to search based on fund, project id, PI name, and project title/nickname. It is now easier to search from more places in GMAS, so you can spend less time moving between different projects.

If you search based on fund or project id, you will automatically be taken directly to the segment home for that project. All the other options will take you to the search results page.

You can also save a few clicks by pressing the <Enter> key instead of clicking on the search icon...

GMAS will be unavailable starting at 6pm on Friday, December 16th through 9pm on Sunday, December 18th. This outage is for the GMAS release scheduled to go live for December 19th. 

This release includes the new Edit GL Budget screen. The new screen will allow users to send new budgets, and edit existing budgets in the GL for active accounts. The screen will be available to the following roles:

• Central Administrator
• Central Financial Administrator
• Principal Investigator
• Mentor
• Department Administrator
• Lab administrator
• ...

Starting on Monday, December 19th, GMAS users will be able to submit GL budgets through GMAS. If you have never submitted a budget to the GL, you’re probably asking yourself, “why should I bother with GL budgets”. Well, here are some great reasons why:

Having a GL budget

• Assists with the increased requirements from sponsors to report budget to expenditure variances

• Helps to proactively manage/identify the need for re-budget requests to sponsors

• Reduces compliance requests of object codes that are...

GMAS tracks approvals, trainings, and certifications (referred to collectively as “Approvals”) required for requests, projects, or individuals in order to conduct sponsored research. The Research Team generates two of these approvals (Participation Agreement, and Conflict of Interest (COI)) based on each team member’s role as well as the questions answered in the request.

Participation Agreement for Harvard Employees

Generated for all members of the Research Team (anyone who is performing research.) All researchers employed by Harvard must sign...

I get all kinds of requests to answer a variety of questions about sponsored research. There are annual reports, semi-annual reports, quarterly reports, and many ad hoc reports. These reports are generated for sponsors, senior leadership, for audit purposes, many of the offices in central administration, and school deans and departments. The majority of these reports pull data from GMAS and the general ledger. Every piece of data is valuable in GMAS and should be completed as accurately as possible. Every project that is entered into GMAS will appear in one of these reports eventually....

Over the span of the next few weeks, we will be welcoming guest blogger Michael Toon. Mike, a Senior Reporting Analyst from the Office for Sponsored Programs, has been working at Harvard for over forty years. His first twenty years was spent in various positions including a Biophysicist at the Medical School, and Manager of Research Operations at Cell Biology. His second twenty years has been spent at OSP in several positions including a Financial Analyst, a Member of the Operations Team, and he also worked on GMAS development where he focused as Functional Lead migrating data into GMAS....

The GMAS training environment (https://gmastraining.harvard.edu) is refreshed on a weekly basis, on Sundays. It can be used for troubleshooting and for training. All of the data can be manipulated without any impact to real data that is used for reporting, and without sending false notifications to other users.

For questions about the training environment, please contact contactgmas@harvard.edu.

On September 8, 2016 GMAS released a few enhancements to the all documents screen and the document repository screens. 

All Documents

Added the ability to hide items which do not contain documents:

...

On August 26, 2016 GMAS released additional changes to the document repositories. 

• GMAS now allows for upper and lower case characters in an email address for users emailing into gmasdoc@camail.harvard.edu
• The allowable file upload size has been increased from 30MB to 150MB
• A time-stamp has been added to the document details
• All users who can upload documents to a document repository within a request can now also rename and edit the descriptions of documents

There is another...