Improved Business Processes and Integrated Enterprise Reporting
CLIENT:
The National Cancer Institute at Frederick
CHALLENGE
The Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research (FNLCR) is one of 42 Federally Funded Research and Development Centers (FFRDCs) sponsored by the U.S. Government and operated by the FFRDC Contractor. Our client needed a solution to align the National Institutes of Health (NIH) enterprise resource planning system with the contractor operated Costpoint system to improve the quality of reporting across the two organizations. This required normalizing and aggregating data at various levels of granularity to improve reporting.
SOLUTION
Our data experts designed and deployed a custom Frederick Data Mart (FDM) and a web application called the Frederick Funding Solution (FFS) to integrate funding data between NIH Business Systems (NBS) and NCI Frederick Costpoint. These solutions replaced legacy solutions built in Microsoft Access and Excel that were not integrated with authoritative data and inconsistently utilized by staff. The FFS application improves FNLCR’s funding processes by allowing stakeholders to authoritatively “code” requisitions pulled from NBS and “tag” them with Costpoint project metadata for systems synchronization and improved Business Intelligence (BI) reporting. Malbaie also helped with IAA collection efforts and developed reports to reconcile IAA balances for obligations, disbursements, revenue and collections, and undelivered orders.
OUTCOME
The FFS has allowed NCI to capture and harness a complete data set of administrative and financial information. NCI Frederick is now able to transform this data set into actionable information via the FFS web application and the FNLCR’s Cognos Business Intelligence solution. The new and improved reporting solution replaced multiple legacy systems and integrated data from two authoritative systems of record while also improving the ability to reconcile inter-agency agreements (IAAs). This alignment of systems and local data mart has set the stage for continued advancement of financial reporting that is becoming increasingly holistic and authoritative.
