Campus & Community

SAMtool Makes Its Debut

Wednesday, September 9, 2015, By News Staff

A new Sponsored Award Management tool (SAMtool) has made its debut. The SAMtool is a financial and budget management tool for sponsored projects. It was conceived, designed and built with the active participation of a campuswide cross-functional team including central office staff, department and college budget staff, and research faculty from multiple academic units.

The SAMtool can help researchers keep track of their projects.

The SAMtool can help researchers keep track of the budgets for their sponsored projects.

While the SAMtool initiative was launched prior to the Fast Forward (FF) Research Operational Excellence initiative, the themes between the two initiatives share similar guiding principles, namely:

  • Reduce administrative burden on research active faculty and staff;
  • Reduce the need for redundant systems; and
  • Improve the accuracy and timeliness of data and reporting efficiency.

The specific features of the SAMtool are:

  • “dashboard” type reporting for chairs, deans and VPR, providing a summary of department, school/college, and University-level sponsored activities by primary investigators (PIs), total sponsored budget, etc.
  • at-a-glance summary views for PIs and administrators on awards for which they are responsible
  • burn-rate indicators for potential over- or underspending on awards
  • ability to drill down from summary data to multiple sublevels of summary data, and to the transaction level while also providing links to source documentation
  • ability to categorize financial data to mirror OSP budget template categories, providing intuitive analysis throughout the award lifecycle
  • enabling of PIs and administrators to create “what-if” scenarios for project planning, including commitments throughout the grant cycle
  • provision of a clean, consistent and concise reporting tool for all sponsored awards
  • reduction/elimination of the need for shadow systems

The SAMtool provides the ability to harness multiple reporting and budget planning capabilities in a single portal, in addition to the current financial reporting tools.

To support the rollout of this tool, we are providing the following four training sessions:

  • Tuesday, Sept. 29, 9-11 a.m., Peter Graham Scholarly Commons, Bird Library
  • Wednesday, Sept. 30, 2-4 p.m., Peter Graham Scholarly Commons, Bird Library
  • Tuesday, Oct. 20, 3:30-5:30 p.m., Crouse Hinds Hall Auditorium
  • Wednesday, Oct. 28, 9-11 a.m., Peter Graham Scholarly Commons, Bird Library