Synergy helps Medical Research Council position itself in the research funding market

The Medical Research Council of South Africa (MRC) is in a better position to attract local and international funding following the implementation of a business intelligence solution designed to give managers easy access to research project costs and spending.

According to Gillian Staniland, divisional manager of MRC's Knowledge Management Division, while the council has always kept detailed information on projects, their funding, costs and resources, it had not been easy to analyse and report on aggregated views across various data sources.

"It makes it much easier to raise research funds when you have all the information you need at your fingertips. The South African government, as well as international health research funders, such as the World Health Organisation, want to know precisely how we manage our projects.

"We need to know not only that we are spending our money correctly, but also that we are focusing our research efforts locally on those areas where the greatest needs are - currently HIV, TB and Malaria," she says.

MRC has implemented a Cognos-based data mart developed and implemented by Synergy Computing, the business intelligence specialists with more than 21 years experience in implementing data management, decision support tools and data warehousing solutions in SA.

"It was a challenging project in that we had to combine four disparate databases into one data mart to allow information sharing, consolidation and collaboration," says Vera Chaplin, project manager, Synergy Computing. "Even so, after proving a pilot project, we got the site up and running within three months and getting information into the hands of users that they never had access to before."

The data required by the users resides in four disparate databases. Research Administration was on Informix, Contract Funding in MS Access, Human Resources in Universe and General Ledger in Oracle.

Using Microsoft's DTS data extraction and transformation tools, the information from these four data sources was consolidated onto an SQL-based data warehouse.

By being able to analyse project costs resources and output by research project and monitoring the research support staff ratio, management is able to allocate resources more effectively.

"We'd never seen all this information - financial, research and HR - in one consolidated view before," says Staniland.

"Now it's easy and quick to pick up trends and see what needs to be done. Previously, we would print standard reports and distribute them to the different research and support teams around the country."

With Cognos PowerPlay Web, these reports can now be distributed electronically. In addition, users can use PowerPlay's multidimensional analysis capabilities to view data at a basic level, and continue to mine the information by delving into the different layers of the data cube. The data warehouse also includes Cognos Query, which allows users to query the database on the transactional level on an ad hoc basis.

"Data on HR and funding has never really been visible to end users. If they asked for a report then it would be extracted. Now they can get what they want, when they want it," she adds.

Currently, 25 MRC users have been trained on the system by Synergy. The system is currently being run in parallel to the paper-based reporting system, but this is to be phased out and MRC is planning to increase the number to 120 in the near future.

"MRC has a very strict procurement strategy and we chose Synergy because of the depth of expertise it has in this field and its work ethic. The company has been tremendous in helping us implement the system quickly and successfully.

"The next step is to develop the data warehouse to support our balanced score card with key performance indicators so that managers can track efficiencies and performance throughout the organisation," Staniland said. MRC is a science council whose aim is to improve the health and quality of life in SA by conducting excellent scientific research. It is the only research organisation in SA with a collective skills base, allowing it to interpret health needs and mobilise skills and resources into action.

MRC obtains funds both from government budgets and private contracts with international health research funders and responds to tenders on the international science market.