July 28, 2014

KU’s Research Caliber:  strengthen skills and retain top performers

• Held Thursday Research Topics (TRT) session on “Establishing Service Rates” (26 attendees)
• The Office of Research has a fully staffed Invoice Team ready for AR/BI conversion
• All Post Award Teams are fully staffed

Pursue System Improvements:  implement tools that increase faculty and administrative efficiency; collaborate with KUMC where feasible

• Discussions in process to utilize Image Now electronic signature process for effort reporting
• Successfully updated effort reports to generate individual PDF files directly with indexable names to allow sorting, grouping, searching, reporting, etc. This will reduce administrative burden and assist with the electronic signature initiative.
• Discussions and plans continue for improvement of PI delegation system along with university wide system access, security and role assignments for various university financial systems
• Single Sign On (SSO) has been implemented in the CITI system for both KUL and KUMC campuses. This is a pre-cursor to integration with Click for displaying names and dates of training in Click user records. Richard Walker has overseen this project.

KUCR Efficiency:  strengthen operations, processes, and overall effectiveness

• To reduce staff and PI burden student effort reports will transition to 4 times annually
• Continue to utilize Image Now for process improvements:  on agenda are the roll-out of the close letter process, provisional request, PI checklist for PI delegation
• Added reviewers to RFA hold queue to include PAS Team leads for more timely review of RFA details
• Transitioned daily use Post Award reports from technical staff to end users.  Staff can now run a certain set of custom reports without assistance from RIS.