Alloc

Executive Summary

Objective

The allocation module, aka ALLOC, tracks current and historical commitments made by the Vice Chancellor and Dean or by Senior Management, along with revenue coming into the Dean's Office. ALLOC is a tool for long range planning to determine fund availability to cover commitments, reconciliation of fund balances, reporting to departments and senior management on commitments (historical and future), and to track state appropriations and other revenue sources.

Overview

ALLOC is a tool for long range planning to determine fund availability to cover commitments. In addition it provides reconciliation of fund balances, reporting to departments and senior management on commitments (historical, present and future), and to track state appropriations and other revenue sources including: gifts, endowment income and dean’s tax.

The primary outputs of the ALLOC System are Journal Entries that are exported to UCSD’s Integrated Financial Systems (IFIS) and the Dean’s Briefing Report. There is also limited reporting available to authorized Departmental user’s - they can see a subset of information of commitments relating to their department, over a three-year window consisting of the last financial year, the current financial year and the next financial year.

For archival purposes, ALLOC system takes “Snapshots” of each commitment at the end of each fiscal year. These snapshots are read-only and are intended to allow key stakeholders to view the state of any commitment as it existed in previous years.

In addition stakeholders have the ability to link and view supporting documents for a given financial year for a given commitment. Supported document types include but are not limited to:

• Text documents (email extracts)
• Scanned images in JPG format
• Microsoft Word files
• Excel Spreadsheets
• Adobe PDF files
• HTML files

Key Concepts

The ALLOC web application is comprised of the following:

• The Firefox web browser. The Microsoft Internet Explorer web browser is not supported at this time.

• Web pages built from HTML, JavaScript? and Ajax provide the user interface.

• Java Servlets and Java Server Pages (JSP) run inside a Tomcat web server and produce the web pages for the users.

• Java, JDBC and various MysqlTopics? databases are used to store and retrieve the data. The primary MysqlTopics? database is named “Alloc”. Other databases involved are “Ledger” and “som_portal”. “Ledger” provides a bridge to external data such as IFIS. “som_portal” provides access to data used by other systems within the Dean’s Office of the School of Medicine.

• Text files of comma separated values are used to provide data exports of monthly journal entries to the IFIS system.

• A read-only ODBC interface allows authorized users to view the Alloc database using Microsoft Access. The intention is to provide flexible, ad-hoc reporting via this mechanism. However it should be stressed that this connectivity has not been stress-tested or load-tested, and should be regarded as a “proof-of-concept” rather than a promised feature.

• Integration to the UCSD Single Sign-On System