About Genome Alberta

Founded in 2005, Genome Alberta is a nonprofit research corporation that funds and manages genomics research and partnerships. Funded by the province and the federal government of Canada, they support genomics solutions through funding efforts that advance the study of genomes through collaborations and partnerships. Some of their funding efforts are geared toward the improvement of disease prevention, diagnosis, treatment, technologies that assist science programs, and sustainable agricultural and environmental studies.

Too many formats to pull data from

Genome Alberta’s impact data gathering process was scattered and housed in a combination of Excel, Word documents, and PDFs. This created hours of wasted administrative time with little results when it came to developing a sustainable reporting strategy that maximized impact. “It was difficult to pull out project outputs from previous investments, and we needed something better put in place,” says Ryan Mercer, Research Program Manager for Genome Alberta. Without the proper perspective of their funding efforts, it deeply affected their big-picture impact strategies.

The search for the perfect system

When conducting a comprehensive review of other technologies, they were looking for a “perfect fit” to keep up with the unique way their operations were running. They chose SmartSimple Cloud as their flexible solution to track and report the complex funding and disbursement structures. “Other systems didn’t allow for the flexibility that SmartSimple Cloud did.”

A simple solution for a complex process

Transparency is vital for a government-funded entity, and Genome Alberta was able to track and report on exactly where the funds were coming from, where they were dispersed, and how grantees and projects were effectively using the funds on a granular level. Mercer particularly connected with the MS word merge feature, “I can assign date ranges for a report, and it will pull a report in a Word template with all the relevant information to present to our constituents.” By utilizing SmartSimple Cloud’s fully auditable system, “we were easily able to create reports to present to all our stakeholders, and I can get the most current view of the records within the system.”

Using the flexibility of SmartSimple Cloud, they were able to configure a streamlined application intake system, an impact reporting system that created ad-hoc reports that included return on investment dashboards. Mercer also configured the system to create real-time reports to give insight into external and internal operations, “creating these dashboards and systems gave us a broader picture of our funding efforts and a holistic view with day to day reporting.”

A system that scales

When SmartSimple Cloud was first implemented, they configured it to serve as a project management tool to track granting activities, performance, and evaluate post-award programs. Administrators were empowered to delegate relevant data to different project managers to access only for their project. “We created a user guide for the project managers, and it was taken quite well,” says Mercer. As their needs grew, the system was flexible to scale with them. They then configured a separate system for tracking corporate funding grants for a simplified workflow.