GRANTS AND CONTRACTS ADMINISTRATION
Charles Tarantino Assistant Vice President for Grants and Contracts
In 2022, the Post-Award Team focused on team building and incorporated many new talented team members into its operations and was pleased to fill its final vacancy. It was also a year of systems implementations, process refinement and improvements. The Post-Award team implemented the awards component of the new Huron Grants and Agreements module “Grants and Agreements,” called GRAMS. The system interfaces with PeopleSoft and no longer requires duplicative data entry, which provides streamlining to the award process. The costing area of the Post Award team implemented the new Huron Effort reporting module called Effort Compensation Compliance (ECC). The university will be reducing the three effort reporting periods down to two semi-annual reporting periods, reducing faculty workload and strengthening the controls by adding pre-reviewers to the effort reporting process. In addition to the effort reporting implementation, the costing team implemented a new cost sharing process that integrates an important function into the general ledgers where faculty will be able to obtain current cost sharing data for their awards online. The team has completed and submitted the first F&A proposal submitted to the Federal government in 10 years. This was a dynamic effort that involved working with many areas of the university, such as facilities, asset management and space that are not normally involved in sponsored project activity. The Post-Award team created a suite of accounts receivable reporting tools that allow for comprehensive data and intelligence gathering related to our receivable activity. This along with revised procedures has allowed for a reduction in outstanding receivable balances by 50 percent. Finally, in terms of award closeout, the Post-Award team created a reporting tool that will assist the team in closing out our sponsored projects, reducing the amount of time and areas of our systems that need to be reviewed in order to ensure a proper closeout.
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