Supporting the financial operations associated with the close to 1,200 principal investigators at Canada’s largest research hospital is a complex task.
With around $475 million spent on research annually at UHN, there is a real need for modern financial management, reporting and collaboration tools. To address this need, UHN’s Research Financial Services team consolidated data, workflows, processes and operations involved in managing the research business into one central application known as Business Hub.
The financial management system was built using Salesforce—a leading business application—with support from Industrious CRM, which provided implementation services for implementing the new digital tool.
Launched at the start of 2022, the hub was made possible through the efforts of a small, agile development team comprising UHN’s Business Intelligence Manager Gert Wieland and Senior Business Analyst Christopher King.
The custom cloud application was designed, built and launched within 18 months—and it has received rave reviews from the research community and research support teams. The hub was also featured as a recent success story by Salesforce [PDF case study download to browser].
The Business Hub homepage dashboard provides key information to users in a user-focused and intuitive format.
“The benefits of an intuitive and user-focused financial reporting and management tool are felt everyday—by making the lives of our scientists easier, we are helping them focus their efforts on advancing their world-leading research,” says Mr. King.
Business Hub has an intuitive interface that can be customized to different users, such as principal investigators or administrators. It enables users to monitor their financial status in near real time, with analysis on spending rates, remaining resources or other variables available at a glance.
With more timely information on hand, researchers can make more informed decisions around their projects. Some of the milestones achieved by the hub in it’s first year of operation are listed below:
• 1500+ research community users activated
• 900+ research accounts opened via Business Hub
• Three sizeable legacy MS Access databases sunset
In building the new system, the development team has engineered it for automated data entry and contract management, thereby eliminating many manual tasks. They have also integrated common processes, such as opening accounts, processing transactions or preparing financial statements, to reduce the volume of repetitive interactions between researchers and support teams.
Importantly, the developers designed the platform not only to be compatible with existing data sources but also to be highly adaptable, so that it can meet all future use cases and needs.
The team attributes the new platform’s success to four development practices:
• Understanding the business requirements first;
• Investing in a modern system;
• Not over-engineering the system up front; and
• Getting professional support early on.
“The Business Hub exemplifies how we can use technology and digital tools to empower UHN’s researchers in their work to improve health care,” says Mr. Wieland. “It also embodies the continuous quality improvement that is needed to ensure our research enterprise operates smoothly.”