Business Reporting & Analytics Service Enhancements

Worktribe is one of the core University Research Information Systems, which processes around £1bn worth of research funding applications every year. This involves the entering and processing of thousands of individual project records, with data entered by multiple people and teams across research support functions.

The Research Support Office (RSO) are very keen to maximise use of the data available from Worktribe and have been exploring the use of Power BI to help in enabling access to and exploration of data.  Power BI is a business analytics tool available to UoE staff through Office 365.

The Research Support Office (RSO), Research Information Systems (RIS) in Library and University Collections and IS Applications are collaborating to develop a set of internal Power BI dashboards for RSO staff, and are using the new Microsoft Enterprise Gateway functionality to enable automatic nightly refreshes of data. These dashboards allow some basic data checks to be completed, and basic Worktribe reports to be run by the users responsible for entering data into the system.

The dashboards have a number of benefits: they remove dependency on reporting staff to do manual data updates, Power BI alerts reporting staff if a data refresh fails, frontline staff can easily check and correct records with missing data and are able to run basic reports from Worktribe themselves.

These reports are a first step for the RSO in using Power BI and the Enterprise Gateway to support internal business processes. We are also currently exploring and developing a number of Power BI dashboards, linking in with GaSP’s work on the University strategic performance KPIs and we are excited to see what else we can do with these tools!

If you are interested in utilising the analytical and visualisation features of Power BI then please visit the Business Reporting and Analytics service page, or submit a query through the form to Service Management.