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    Release Notes

    • There is now a “Convert to Canadian Dollars” toggle for Canadian Universities in the platform for all External Charts.
    • Updated ABC Insights logo for Chrome and IE tab in browser

    • Chart Updates:

      • By default, the chart notes will now be open when using Internal or External charts.  The user still has the ability to collapse the Chart Notes.

    • Chart Updates: 

      • External Charts:

        • When drilling down into the sub-activity bars on the External Single Year and External Year Compare charts, you will now be able to see the top 5 department drivers along with the totals.

        • If you hover over the ‘?’ icon by ‘Selected Divisions’, you will be able to view which standard schools you have selected.

      • Division Detail:

        • Division and department sections will remain constant while changing Fiscal Years for easier comparison

    • Chart Updates: 
      • My Dashboard: 
        • As a new user, your default year upon login will be the university’s most recent provisional or finalized fiscal year.
    • Profile Updates: 
      • “Submit” button added to the top of the Custom Data View for user’s ease of use among those settings 
    • Chart Updates: 
      • External Charts: 
        • Added additional info in legend to differentiate between focus and peer bar
    • Chart Updates:
      • Division Detail: 
        • Added the AIM (Administrative Intensity Measure) Ratio to the donut chart, along with a hover explaining what it is and how it is calculated. 
        • Moved the donut totals to the top of the donuts.
      • External Charts: 
        • The focus university chart note is now visible in the chart notes. This lets you know why your university may be provisional. 
        • Added Peer Counts to the peer selector and the charts.
        • Added a warning that tells you if your Custom Data View is on, and how many subactivities it is hiding.
    • Chart Updates:
      • Added percentages to the activity labels on the division detail charts. Added the Administrative Intensity Measure (AIM) ratio to the header. Changed the Activity slices to be sorted by magnitude (except for Non-SAM).
    • User updates:
      • New users now start with all peers selected.
    • Model updates: 
      • New characteristic option for Hospital – now indicates whether the hospital data was included in the university’s payroll file submission.
    • Chart Updates:
      • Dashboard:  Added external labor to the denominator and (where applicable) to the numerator for the first module. Because we don’t ask for external contracts explicitly performing activities in excluded areas of our SAM, this means that your numbers should go up slightly on this module. As a side effect, this module now should match the charts properly when viewing the charts with the denominator “Total Labor Spend”.
    • Chart Updates:
      • Dashboard: Added a peer selector and year selector to the dashboard so that you may customise your view to look at the comparisons that are important to you.
      • Dashboard:  Added a new module to the dashboard that displays how your SAM spend as a percent of total labor spend stacks up against other universities, and highlights the three activities where this ratio differs the most between your university and the peer average.
      • Dashboard:  Added FTE versions of all modules, allowing you to view all the metrics through an FTE lens instead of spend. 
    • Chart Updates:
      • New External Denominators: Two new denominators have been added to the external charts: “Selected Standard Division Labor Spend” and “Selected Standard Division FTE”. These denominators will allow you to normalize by division size across only the selected divisions of interest.
    • Model Updates:
      • External Contracts that are funded by a single division are now placed into the Standard Division of that parent division, rather than into the Standard Division “External Labor”.
    • Chart Updates:
      • You can now view title details at the Campus level on the Division Detail screen.
    • Mapping Updates:
      • We now show Position ID at the person level. This will drastically reduce the title count at some member institutions.
    • Model Updates:
      • We have introduced a 9th Activity to the SAM entitled “General Administration”. It is broken up into two subactivities, “Senior Leadership” and “Departmental Support”. We have converted most all FY15+ data in the platform to use this new Activity and will be updating FY14 based on member need/prioritization.
      • Unmappable: We have introduced a new designation called “Unmappable”. When ABC and the university are unable to determine what an employee does with reasonable accuracy, we can designate that employee as “Unmappable”. We are still working on how best to display these employees in our benchmarking charts.
      • Employee Class: We have removed “Office Admin” and “Executive Leadership” from the employee classification list since this became partially redundant with our new General Administration Activity. We have split “Students and Temps” into 2 classes, “Students” and “Temps”.
    • Chart Updates:
      • The external multi-year trending tab is now in beta. If you wish to have access to this graph, please contact your CSM. This graph displays SAM Spend or FTE per year trended over time, filtered by activity, subactivity, org classification, and employee classification.  
      • We have reworked the charts to render faster, up to an order of magnitude faster in many cases.
    • Chart Updates:
      • Improved the performance of the Peer Selector.
      • Fixed an issue where Custom Data View would not properly handle subactivities that did not exist in 2014 on 2014 charts.
      • Reduced the fade time on chart hover tooltips to 0.1 seconds (was 0.5).
    • Chart Updates:
      • “All Subactivities” view: The External Single Year and Percent of Peers charts now have a toggle that allows users to view all Subactivities in the SAM at once.
      • Horizontal Activity Bars:  We have moved the orientation of most charts from vertical to horizontal in order to improve usability, specifically when viewing all subactivites.
    • Profile updates:
      • Custom Peer sets: Users may now save and load custom peer sets. They can be accessed, edited, created, and saved from the Peer selector, as well as a new page on the profile tab.
    • Model updates:
      • We enhanced our payroll file import process to explicitly store flags for the following employee classes: faculty, temp, student. In addition to standardizing the location of this information for future developments, this also allows us to store more information in our title fields to aid in the mapping and migration processes.
    • Chart Updates:
      • Custom Data View: We have added a new feature that allows you to control what subactivities you wish to view across the entire platform. Under your profile, there is a new tab labeled “Custom Data View”. Here you may turn on and off all the subactivities in the model. Any subactivity deselected on this page will not show up on any chart, for both you and your peers. This page does not affect your dashboard at this time.
      • Added Denominator definitions as hover text while selecting your denominator on external charts.
      • Denominators on the external charts now use the previous year’s value if the current year’s value is not available (e.g. IPEDS data may not be updated for the most recent year).
    • Chart Updates:
      • Percent of Peer Average Charts:  We have added a new External Chart, the Percent of Peer Average chart. This chart allows you to view your spend or FTE in any activity/subactivity as a percentage of your selected peer average. You can choose to cut by Organizational classification (All, Central or Decentral) and normalize by the Analysis Factor of your choice.
    • General Updates:
      • We have added a new user role that restricts the user from viewing the mapping and settings pages. This user type may be used to issue login IDs to a wider variety of university personnel.
    • Chart Updates:
      • We have added External Labor to all of our charts; previously it was only available on the External charts. For Internal charts, External Labor shows up under a new division entitled “University-Wide External Labor”, with each separate contract being represented by a department within that division. Contracts that are exclusive to a single division at the university can be found as a department within the division to which they are exclusive.
      • You may now select Currency denominators with AWI adjusted when the numerator is not AWI adjusted, and vice versa. This is to enable scenarios where the numerator is affected by changes in local AWI, but it is not reasonable to expect the denominator value to be affected by changes in local AWI, such as Development Funds Raised.

    General Updates:

    • Help Pages – Our new support page is now live in the platform!  You can visit it by clicking the “?” icon in the top right corner of the platform.  Here you can find tons of helpful information including definitions, use case demonstration, FAQs, and more.

    Chart Updates:

    • Insights Dashboard – We are excited to announce a new landing page for our users!  Your homepage on the ABC platform will now be a dashboard of curated high-level insights about your institution – perfect for a CFO in a hurry!  Here are the modules we currently are displaying (we will be adding more over time):
      • SAM Investment per Head – Using ABC’s employee count and IPEDS’ student count, we can come up with the total number of people on your campus. How much money do you spend on SAM labor for each one? Compare yourself against peers and see which activities are driving your variance.
      • Percent of SAM Centralization – How centralized is your administrative support? Compare yourself against peers and see which activities are driving your variance.
      • Academic SAM Spend Intensity – How much are your academic units spending on SAM activities? Compare yourself against peers and see which of your academic divisions are spending the most on administrative functions.
    • Peer Selector- We have overhauled our peer selector to improve its usefulness and usability. The focus university information is now always visible as you scroll.  You may now choose a subset of Analysis Factors and Characteristics to compare on. Your selected peers will all float to the top, while peers who have no data for the year in question will float to the bottom.
    • More Denominator options – When FTE is selected as your numerator, you may now select currency analysis factors as your denominator. In this case, they will be shown as “per Million Dollars”.
    • Standard Division Selector – moved divisions between the two panels so they are grouped in a more intuitive way.

    Mapping Updates

    • People Page- We’ve made some improvements to the People page. These should help the page be more responsive and intuitive.
      • The page no longer executes a search on initial load. This search takes a long time unless filtered, so the user is given the opportunity to filter first.
      • There is a new filter that shows only people who have been ignored.
      • There is a new button that allows the ignoring/unignoring of people from this page.

    Model Updates:

    • We have added two new Analysis Factors – 12 Month Student Count unduplicated (IPEDS), and Fall Student FTE (IPEDS).

    Chart Updates:

    • Tab Structure – We have split our benchmarking charts into two categories, Internal and External. Internal charts deal with benchmarking divisions within the member campus.  External charts deal with comparing the member campus to others.
    • Division Detail View – This page provides university users a view into their SAM breakdown and title information for a particular division.  It may be found under the “Internal” tab.
    • Internal Division Selector- Divisions are now categorized by their Academic category – Academic, Non-Academic, and Hybrid. Each category has its own select all button.

    Model updates:

    • Departments now have an additional property – Academic or Non-academic. Divisions inherit this property from their departments as follows: If all departments are academic, the division is academic. If all departments are Non-Academic, the division is Non-Academic. If the departments are mixed, the Division is Hybrid.
    • “Outsourced Contracts” has been renamed to “External Labor” wherever it appears in the platform. We believe this more accurately represents what we are measuring in this classification by distinguishing between labor and non-labor costs.

    Chart Updates:

    • Added Numerator and Denominator dropdowns to Internal Benchmarking charts, replacing the Analysis Factor dropdown.

    Chart Updates:

    • On the External Benchmarking charts, the Analysis Factor dropdown has been replaced with two separate dropdowns. One selects the numerator (which will be salary or FTE), and the other selects the denominator (the analysis factor). The available denominator list is curated so that the AWI math is always consistent and meaningful. This change allows dividing FTE values by ABC Analysis Factors which was previously not possible.

    Mapping Updates:

    • Multiple Migration enhancements that increase consistency and reliability of the migration and migration audit processes.

    Chart Updates

    • External Peer Selector- A wide variety of information about all the members of the consortium is now available within the peer selector to help you choose the best peers for your university and for your specific question.
    • Internal Year Compare – This chart now breaks your divisions into 3 categories: “Perfect Division Match”: The division and all underlying departments match across the two years selected. “Imperfect Division Match”: The division and some underlying departments match across the two years selected. “No Division Match”: The division does not have a match in one of the two years selected.
    • Year Compare Charts – The bars now include sub-activities that existed in only one of the two years. This resolves the discrepancy between viewing a year on the Single Year chart versus viewing that same year on the Year Compare Chart. A breakdown of how the sub-activities have changed is still available in the chart notes.
    • Division Detail – Now starts at a campus-wide level (“All Divisions”). Select a division to drill in and select a department to drill in further.

    Mapping Updates:

    • The People page table now has an extra column with a link to the subgroup that contains that person.
    • PCs may now map on the Subgroups page.

    Chart Updates:

    • We have a new chart! The “Division Details” tab on the mapping pages provides a breakdown of the total labor spend within a division, the total SAM labor spend within that division, and a list of all titles and associated information within that division.
    • Provisional Notes: If a university in an external chart is provisionally benchmarkable, a list of steps needed for finalization is available from a link in the chart notes below the chart.

    Model Updates:

    • Added characteristics:
      • Grad Student Union (yes/no)
      • UBO Region
    • Added Analysis Factor:
      • ABC Payroll File Total Paid $
    • Added descriptions for Organizational Class and Employee Class to the help documentation (accessible by pressing the question mark in the upper right.)

    Mapping Updates:

    • Departments within the same division can now be mapped to different standard divisions. This is primarily to differentiate within divisions with large off-campus or optional components such as agriculture. In general, without significant and verified justification, ABC will refrain from splitting up divisions in this way.
    • Added links to the subgroups page from all over the platform that will scroll to and load the subgroup of interest.
    • Added additional summary information to the Mapping Overview page.
    • Added additional pre-import information to help audit incoming payroll files.
    • Enhanced the migration process to better enable reverse migration from later FY to earlier FY.

    Mapping Updates:

    • Migration has been moved to the mapping tabs, and a new tab has been added to facilitate integration of payroll files into the migration process.
    • The Payroll Files tab has been reworked. It may now be used to pre-load a payroll file for initial auditing before permanently committing it to the platform.
    • Added a warning flag in the subgroup header to indicate potential issues with subgroups including departments in both Centralized and Decentralized areas.
    • Subgroups now have information regarding the Org Class Activity Mappings of the departments within them:
      • Each title shows the Activity Mapping of its department.
      • There is a count of departments by Activity Mapping at the top of the subgroup.
      • Added “Multiple Department Activity Mappings” check to the subgroup header warning flag.

    User Updates:

    • Division and department head university user roles have been removed. Users with these roles have either been deleted, deactivated, or converted to full university users.

    Model Updates:

    • Added new Artifact Types. The current list of artifact types is:
      • Clear Title
      • Conversation
      • Position Description
      • LinkedIn Profile
      • Member Website
      • Other Online Resource

    Navigation Updates:

    • The platform has been reorganized to streamline workflow. This primarily affects internal users, but a few changes are visible to external users:
      • The fiscal year selector has been moved from the top center to the upper right corner.
      • The “Hi ___” dropdown menu has been removed. The first link (“University Settings”) has been moved into a new top navbar tab labeled “Settings”. The profile and logout links have been added to the top navbar as icons.
      • The mapping tabs have been reordered to match the order in which they usually are worked on in a given implementation.

    Chart Updates:

    • External charts’ legends have been simplified. One label now controls the visibility of both peer and focus university bars for a given component.
    • Component panels on external chart popups are now collapsible.
    • Year compare popups: Divisions and departments that do not have a migration chain between the start year and end year have been added to the External Year Compare popup, bringing the numbers in line with the chart’s values. The missing year is represented as $0. The same applies for the Internal Year Compare popup, with the exception that broken division chains do not appear on the graph and are thus not viewable.

    Chart Updates:

    • Users may now compare two years of external benchmarking data side-by-side on the new External Year Compare tab. Each also comes with their own drill-in popups that contain an alternate view of the data.
    • Chart Notes: There’s a lot to keep track of when building an ABC chart. The chart notes can help you understand exactly what it is you’re looking at. Simply click on the “Chart Notes” hyperlink at the bottom of each chart to expand.
    • Provisional Data: University Years that are still going through the final verification processes have been added to the benchmarking charts. If a user happens to select one or more of these, a notice at the top left of the chart will appear. Refer to the Chart Notes for more information about a specific chart.
    • Data Views: Previously, the External and Peer in Compare charts were split into four cost categories (Central, Decentral, Shared Services, Outsourced Contracts). That split, referred to as Organizational Classification, is now one of two possible choices we call Data Views. The other choice is called Employee Classification and breaks up the bars into the following five categories: Professional, Senior Leadership, Office Admin, Students/Temps, and Outsourced. All charts except for Internal Year Compare now support this choice (Internal Year Compare is a difference chart and cannot be broken up in this manner).
    • Internal Single Year chart now is clickable. Clicking on a bar will break one school or division down by Activity, Data View, and Department.

    Model Updates:

    • The list of required Analysis Factors to be provided by the university has been modified and shortened. The following Analysis Factors are required:
      • Research Awards
      • Development Funds Raised
      • Square Feet Cleaned
      • Acres Maintained
      • Purchase orders and Amendments >$5000
    • The following Analysis Factors are optional, and are under consideration to be added to the required list starting in FY18:
      • Purchase Orders and Amendments <$5000
      • P-card and T-card Transactions
      • Payroll Disbursements (ACH/Wire)
      • Payroll Disbursements (Checks/Paper)
      • AP Disbursements (ACH/Wire)
      • AP Disbursements (Checks/Paper)
    • Determining which Activities in a department are Centralized is no longer intrinsic to the Standard Division Model. For a given department, Central/Decentral/Shared Services designation and Standard Division are assigned separately.
    • The following Standard Divisions have been removed:
      • Central Facilities
      • Central IT
      • Central HR
      • Central Student Services
      • Central Research Admin
      • Central Development
      • Central Finance
      • Central Communications
      • School of Government
    • The following Standard Divisions have been added:
      • Centralized Admin
      • Agriculture Extensions
      • Online Education

    Mapping Updates:

    • Artifacts have been standardized and improved: Artifacts now exist independently of the mapping they were created with. This allows users to add or remove people from an artifact after its creation, or to remove an artifact reference from a person’s mapping history. Artifacts now fall into one of three types: Document, Conversation, and Clear Title.
    • Clear Title Subgroups have been removed. Clear Titles have been converted into Clear Title Artifacts that apply to all the people in each title. This means that they will no longer apply the clear title mapping to new members of that title during migration.

    Chart Updates:

    • Position In Compare is now its own tab, where users may compare a focus university against all individual peers from a peer set for all activities, one activity, or one sub activity.  This replaces the sub activity peer in compare on the external single year chart.
    • All external charts now have a university-wide rollup that combines all the activities into one.
    • Clicking on a sub activity bar on the External Single Year chart now opens up the focus university total paid data for that sub activity instead of opening a Position in Compare view for that sub activity.

    Chart Updates:

    • External Chart now displays percentage of the hovered section compared to the total bar.
    • AWI now defaults to off.

    Mapping Updates:

    • Subgroup details are now collapsible.

    Chart Updates:

    • Added Employee Classification Data View to External Charts. This allows an alternative subdivision of each bar into the following categories: Professional, Senior Leadership, Office Admin, Students and Temps, Contracts. This feature is in Beta.
    • Internal Schools Popup is now Sorted alphabetically.
    • Outsourced Contracts calculation and visualization changed to be more in line with what users expect it to represent.
    • Improved load times for most charts.

    Mapping Updates:

    • Text boxes for comments now permit and record text formatting.
    • Users may now enter Analysis Factor values with commas.

    Profile Updates:

    • Beta Mode: Users may now request access to be part of the ABC beta testing team. These users will gain access to up and coming features to provide feedback.
    • Usernames must now be distinct.

    Chart Updates:

    • School Selector now separates Central and Decentral schools and sorts in a more intuitive way.
    • Peer bars on the Position in Compare graph are no longer clickable.

    Mapping Updates:

    • Notes no longer have a 4000 character limit.
    • Added a field for university users to comment on subgroups.

    Model Updates:

    • The following sub activities have been merged:
      • IT: Research has been merged into IT: Application Development
      • IT: Networking and IT: Project Management have been merged into IT: Infrastructure.
      • All Mappings have been updated retroactively to match the new model.

    Profile Updates:

    • Most user preferences are now stored for future use.

    Model Updates:

    • Added Characteristics – Has Hospital.
    • Added Analysis Factors: Payroll Headcount (ABC), FTE (IPEDS)
    • Added Standard Schools: Agriculture, Arts & Sciences, Athletics
    • Sub activities now have a start year. This prevents them from being shown on charts for fiscal years prior to their implementation.
    • Added sub activities (start year 2015):
      • Facilities: Dining Services
      • Student Services: International Programs
      • Student Services: Residential Services
      • Student Services: Recreational Services
        • Renamed “Student Services: Diversity/Multicultural” to “Student Services: Diversity”.

    Chart Updates:

    • Standard School/Division selector now shows divisions that do not exist for the focus university, which are labeled with an asterisk.
    • Added a scroll bar to the Analysis Factor Matrix.
    • Users may switch years in the top navbar to view their 2015 data and settings.
    • Benchmarking is now the default University User homepage.
    • Series that you have de-selected via the legend now maintain that status when creating a new graph, if applicable.
    • Breadcrumb links now maintain Analysis Factor switches.
    • Analysis Factor is now saved in the session. The next graph loaded will default to that Analysis Factor rather than resetting.
    • Fixed an issue with Analysis Factor changes preventing Benchmark Graphs from being displayed in some instances.
    • Added descriptions of the Internal Chart Analysis Factors.

    Mapping Updates:

    • Subgroups in progress now turn pink in all cases.
    • Added audits to the payroll file import process.
    • Users may now compare Universities across years on the sub activity audit page.