The concept of effort reporting has been a part of constant debate and has resurfaced in the education sector. Here, each employee involved in Federal research is periodically asked to report the amount of their university effort on Federal grant projects, other university activities such as teaching, administration and all other practices. This effort report is then used to allocate percentage of employee’s compensation to the federal projects on which they worked during the reporting period.
Illustration Ref: Office of Budget & Finance
In reality, the process of effort reporting has got its own set of challenges around practical difficulties in capturing the information, misunderstandings and compliance risks. The entire process is very cumbersome for the faculty and employees. There are loop holes in the system because of which time and again, this has become a subject of federal False Claims Act (FCA) enforcement in the university research area. Hence it became imperative to have a system in place that could overcome the following roadblocks:
1. Inability of faculty members to confirm, generate and approve effort reports
2. Having a system that will adhere to the regulations set up by OMB(The Office of Management and Budget) Circular A-21
3. A huge task to integrate the system with the payroll system
4. Documentation of time spent by individuals on federally sponsored projects
5. Ensuring adherence to compliance by institutions
6. Assigning designees to verify the effort reports
Sodales Solutions has used SAP Fiori UX to provide the right interface to the faculties so that they can capture and submit their effort reporting, using the Effort Report App which is a natural extension to SAP SuccessFactors in the education sector. The solution runs on SAP Cloud Platform and is specifically designed and developed for user group consisting of faculty members, managers, employees and investigators
The solution has been designed specifically for the education sector so that they users can:
1. Plan their own effort and also for their team prior to the commencement of federally sponsored projects
2. Easily approve/deny effort reports for each reporting period
3. Assign designates to verify and confirm effort reports
There are two key elements which serve as the value drivers based on which the system is already a successful deploy. The value drivers are illustrated in the diagram below.
Sodales Solutions is an award-winning SAP Cloud Platform solution extension partner. Sodales was founded as a consulting company. Over the past one year, Sodales has evolved into a successful application development company focused on developing and selling apps built on Hana Cloud Platform. Sodales has referenceable customers across industries and geographies for SCP apps. Sodales has expertise in SCP DBAAS, WebIDE plug-ins, S/4 HANA extensions, SAP SuccessFactors extensions and SAP Smart Business Apps, and is now expanding rapidly into the Ariba extension space.
To get a walkthrough of the system and know more about our SAP SuccessFactor Extension apps, write to us at sana.salam@sodalessolutions.com or call us at +1.647.824.4286
