The Proposal Development and Costing part of the new Research Information System (RIS) (Work Package A) has been successfully launched in all of our UK schools and faculties and we are planning to roll out the award management part of the system (Work Package B) in the Autumn.

Feedback to date on RIS has been positive, with users reporting that the system is relatively simple to navigate and easier to use as a costing tool than the university’s historic pFACT system.

More than 650 funding applications have been entered into RIS by academic and research management staff from all faculties and over 160 of these have now progressed to the stage where we are waiting for a response from the relevant funder.

By the end of the three-month faculty roll out period more staff were using RIS than the total number of registered pFACT users. Some of you may be aware that the salary information within pFACT has not been updated recently and we are now at the stage where we need to decommission the pFACT system.

From Tuesday 1 August 2017, pFACT will therefore be switched to a read only system. From that date costing information in pFACT will be accessible, but it won’t be possible to update existing costings or create any new ones – since this should now be done in RIS.

If you have any existing costings in pFACT that you might like to progress to the application stage in the future, please contact the designated RIS Manager for your faculty to discuss transferring this information across to RIS as soon as possible. The relevant contacts for each faculty are:-

• Faculty of Arts – Sally Bowden
• Faculty of Engineering – Rachel Brereton or Karen Attreed
• Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences – Jonathan Hollands
• Faculty of Social Sciences – Paula Gurteen
• Faculty of Science – Shaun Beebe

If you haven’t yet registered for RIS and would like to do so then all staff members can do this by accepting the Terms and Conditions on the RIS learning module on Moodle. Your account will be activated within 48 hours.