Turning valuable data into actionable information for Federal executives and staff has been a long-standing challenge. Following an extensive pilot, GrantSolutions released Business Intelligence (BI) Dashboards bringing helpful new insights to grants managers and staff.
Last year, the Administration of Children and Families (ACF) asked GrantSolutions to find new ways to use existing data to improve workflow efficiencies and processes. BI Dashboards allow users to view information at an Executive level and quickly drill down into further detail. The dashboards provide visibility into the data, allow insights to emerge, and offer opportunities to rethink and improve business processes.
As part of a pilot initiative, ACF and GrantSolutions jointly designed preliminary BI Dashboards, and then expanded the pilot to interested Partners. For the first time, the dashboards revealed real-time grant processing data that allows Partners to manage grants workload more efficiently.
ACF used visualization tools to identify bottlenecks and implement process improvements that significantly accelerated award timing. This was accomplished through several BI Dashboards delivered in mid-July, facilitating ACF to track the completion of FY17, new and continuations awards.
The BI Dashboards tracked how many funding memos were approved and the number of awards issued to-date for the current fiscal year. The Dashboards leveraged the GrantSolutions workflow and tracked the status of award actions, enabling AFC leadership to quickly view opportunities for workflow improvements. The results were immediate; ACF was able to reduce the number of awards put on restriction by 67 percent from FY16 to FY17.
The newly developed BI Dashboards delivered real-time, actionable information to facilitate the timely completion of the year-end grant workload.
Dashboards features include:
- Calculating the total workload for both new and continuation awards;
- Hourly data refresh, comparison of FY 2017 progress to prior fiscal years; and
- Ability to “drill-down” into individual grant programs, etc.
The objective of the GrantSolutions BI Initiative is to deliver robust grant information to all levels of the organization. Through data visualization, Partners are provided the opportunity to utilize data to highlight successes, identify challenges, and provide data-driven decisions.
