UNB Research

Support from the Government of Canada’s Research Support Fund has enabled UNB’s Office of Research Services to bring on staff to help our team modernize workflows and make processes more time-efficient and reliable.

Software support specialist Chelsey Rickard joined ORS last January, and in that short time has already been able to transform UNB’s research administration.

UNB is among the many Canadian research institutions that use Process Pathways’ ROMEO platform for grants administration management. We recently added their Research Portal module to our system, and Rickard took a lead on leveraging this functionality to digitize our internal awards application process entirely within the software platform.

Rickard built the application forms and the process for handling these submissions. Before, researchers would need to obtain signatures directly from chairs and deans and submitted scanned applications by email. Staff workloads also meant that between confirming receipt of the application and notifying researchers of a decision, status updates were generally not available.

Now, approvals are automatically requested when an application is submitted and can be provided digitally directly through the portal. Researchers can also check on the status of their application, which is updated throughout the process.

Leveraging other automation technologies, Rickard has also helped research finance staff save days, if not weeks, of manual processing work.

Canada’s federal funding councils require institutions to report annually on every active tri-agency grant held by their researchers. With some 450 research-active faculty members, UNB has hundreds of active grants from these agencies.

Once these statements of account are completed, they are also provided to researchers for their records. Rickard automated this process, enabling hundreds of forms to be sent to the responsible researcher in a fraction of the time it used to require.

Rickard also helped research finance staff improve their end-of-year aggregate reporting to the tri-agencies. The federal funding agencies use a unified web-based portal, known as the Financial Data Submission and Reconciliation (FDSR) system, to collect financial information from institutions.

However, because the financial management systems used by universities handle their data differently, data needs to be processed to match one system to the other. Many universities, including UNB, have encountered challenges bringing the data from their financial tracking systems to the FDSR portal without errors that require significant manual work to correct.

Working with financial analyst Kara MacGillivray, Rickard designed, developed and implemented a spreadsheet that retrieves information exported from UNB’s internal accounting system, performs the calculations required to transform it into what was required by the FDSR, and populate the submission template accordingly.

These process efficiencies have been made possible thanks to the RSF support UNB receives, which provided the funding that enabled UNB to create this staff position.