RAS integrates with the PeopleSoft Financial system to transmit data and budget info about awarded grants. This page details that integration at a high level. More detailed specs can be found at the RAS-PeopleSoft-Axiom Integration folder on Box at https://tufts.app.box.com/folder/16439032930.
Data Flow
Data about awarded grants is entered by OVPR's Post-Award team in the RAS Award Module (step 1, below) and Award Budget Tool (step 2). The final step of this process is for the Post-Award Specialists to approve the final budgets, which puts the budget records in the "To Be Posted" status (step 3).
Every five minutes, the RAS-PeopleSoft integration job runs and scans for all Award Budgets in the "To Be Posted" state. For each budget to be posted, the job assembles all of the necessary data from the Award and Budget tables, and creates a new transaction in a set of tables within the RAS database which are visible to PeopleSoft (step 4).
The PeopleSoft Financial system monitors these tables for new transactions. When a transaction is found, PeopleSoft reads the data and creates or updates the Funding Source, Grant, and Journal according to the given data (step 5). PeopleSoft then updates the transaction in the shared tables with a success or error status (step 6) and sends email notifications to the user informing them of the success or failure of the operations (step 7).
Technical Components
The core of the RAS-PS integration is a SQL script which is run every five minutes via a cron job. (See the Automated Tasks section of the Operational Environment page.) This script contains all of the logic for pulling award/budget data from the RAS database tables and populating the shared PS tables with the appropriately. It also handles comparison of current budget data with the budget history so that the PeopleSoft totals can be adjusted by the correct amount. This is important because, for security reasons, RAS does not have direct visibility into the PeopleSoft transactions. Instead it uses the budget history within the Award Budget Tool to determine how much the account should be changed by. (Example: If budget 1.0 allocates $1000, and budget 2.0 increases that amount to $1500, RAS compares the two and sends PS the net change of $500.)
The primary database tables used in the integration are TUPS_FUNDING_SOURCE, TUPS_GRANT, and TUPS_JOURNAL. These are the tables which PeopleSoft reads to create or update the Funding Source, Grant, and Budget Journals.
The schemas for these tables are below. More detailed information on the fields and specifications for the integration can be found on Box at: https://tufts.app.box.com/folder/16439032930
TUPS_FUNDING_SOURCE
TUPS_GRANT
TUPS_JOURNAL
