While we leveraged the latest web technologies to deliver a compelling FEC application, we also used some traditional techniques – first we listened to some pretty smart folks, then we thoughtfully deconstructed the problem before trying to solve it.

Ideate makes it easy to fulfill FEC requirements by making the application logic apparent to the end user. If you know FEC, you already know how to use our solution. The system manages all the factors and rules so busy researchers and administrators can focus on what’s important – who and what is in the budget – rather than fret over the confounded calculus.

The proof is in the pudding of course, so we invite you to see a demo. In the meantime, here are just a few of the really good FEC-ing features.

Personalized dashboards featuring Ideate’s LIVE REPORT – a real-time listing of all the records a user can access. The LIVE REPORT is searchable and filterable so users can quickly identify records of interest, and you can export those results with a single-click export to PDF, Excel, or CSV, If you want a closer look, individual records can be viewed directly from the LIVE REPORT. Moreover, based on the user’s permissions and the state of the record, the user can initiate applicable actions on the spot (e.g. perform a review, create an award, submit a modification, closeout the record, etc.). The system logs all activity and a summary of “who did what when” is available on demand.

Moving between Ideate screens is near instantaneous even with the auto-save the system performs in the background – most all system functions, except for the most processor intensive functions, run in a second or less, which makes navigation fluid.

Configurable schedules for Salary Bands, FEC Rates, and Salary Grades with ability to publish new schedules with version control and rollback (NB: standard features for all Ideate application tables).

Configurable Field-level context sensitive help.

Develop multiple versions of your costing to consider different scenarios (e.g. with or without equipment; for various sponsors; with or without inflation).

Budget in different currencies, with the system performing exchange rate calculations on-the-fly. You can view a budget in a sponsor currency, or when buying an item from a foreign country you can use their currency to enter the exact amount, and you can flip between these currencies while always retaining the GBP equivalent. .

The Ideate Quick Search utility provides fast table look ups, even for tables with thousands of records, from a single Google-type text box. The Quick Search interrogates multiple data elements and supports partial string searches to facilitate retrieval (people can be looked up by any part of a name, id number, department; sponsors can be looked up by any part of the organization name, id number, or acronym; etc.).

Sophisticated rule-based workflows support one or more levels of approval, and multiple rounds of revisions.

Watch for an upcoming announcement about our latest utility (hint – it’s related to JeS). Ask for a preview at ARMA.

In Ideate, every page view is tailored to help busy researchers and administrators navigate the dizzying array of rules that govern their projects. By dynamically delivering the right mix of procedures at the right time the Ideate software intelligently guides end-user compliance with government regulations, sponsor terms and conditions, and institutional policies.

Ideate’s system-mediated processes not only significantly reduce the effort and guess work involved in managing project requirements; they enable a fundamental shift from reactive compliance to proactive oversight. 

Ideate takes a holistic approach to service orientation. Instead of modelling a research process as a single monolithic flowchart, Ideate has thoughtfully deconstructed complex research lifecycles into loosely-coupled Services. A Service Oriented Process, or process fragment, represents a single step or series of related steps that collectively fulfil an abstracted business need (e.g. form completion; error checking; internal review; account establishment; project startup; etc.).

Ideate’s approach gives it unprecedented support for long-running human-centric processes that involve frequent ‘wait’ periods, extensive conditional branching, complicated decision trees, and interrelated processes. Importantly, the architecture manages all these variables in a consistent and structured way that provides for governance and change management.

The universal componentization of all system resources into loosely-coupled services is the necessary foundation for the dynamic composition that makes Ideate system interactions so responsive. In Ideate, discrete services that come together like tiles in a mosaic to deliver a , every interaction is made-to-order.

Ideate’s exploitation of pervasive loose-coupling to achieve dynamic composition based on context, puts the solution at the pinnacle of any SOA maturity model. 

Importantly, with change being a constant in the research arena, Ideate was built from the ground up with thoughtful consideration of the Information Architecture challenges. As a result, the Service Oriented Framework provides for unprecedented governance and change management, and includes an elegant data repository.

Ideate maintains copies of all versions of a process to ensure a complete audit history and supports process-level roll-back. Administrative modifications to a research process can be submitted through an internal review before any changes are implemented. Data captured in older versions of a process remains available for reporting and can be optionally viewed in their original page layouts.

“The most powerful natural species are those that adapt to environmental change
without losing their fundamental identity which gives them their competitive advantage.”

—Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, 1859

Ideate makes implementation easy with helpful wizards that step central administrators through configuration options without the need for any specialized technical knowledge or extensive product training. Ideate’s Configuration Accelerator greatly reduces the time, cost and risk of a software deployment and expedites the time to productive value. An initial deployment with basic configuration can take as little as one week.

Since all Ideate applications are entirely built up from loosely-coupled services, there are no hardcoded rules, forms, or processes. This means that all of the application logic is open to customization and integration with other internal systems to ensure a best-fit solution – without losing Ideate support for the underlying Framework. With Ideate, organizations can finally say goodbye to vanilla software implementations that force conformity with a generic research model.

With Ideate, institutions can even develop their own applications, leveraging Ideate’s Framework and resource library, to automate orphaned paper processes, to migrate legacy functionality to the platform, or to address new procedural requirements. Member organizations are free to share and/or co-develop applications with other participating institutions. Ideate’s support for open exchange within the user community enables customer-driven change and ensures continuous process improvement.