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Effective December 18, 2009
Successful outcomes of research are often dependent on access to facilities that provide a particular type of research material, data acquisition, data analysis, consultation, and/or other service. Often the use of these facilities is shared across departments and disciplines so that no single research project can be expected to provide direct cost support for operation of the facility. For the purposes of these guidelines, facilities that demonstrate this sort of shared use are defined as core research facilities (or core facilities for short). Core facilities fall under the cost principles established for "Service Centers" in OMB CASB Circular A-21.
UGA has many kinds of core facilities, operated under many different management structures. Smaller facilities that serve only a few research groups may be supported by department budgets or by some combination of contributions from users, or both. Campus-wide facilities that have expensive instrumentation operate with a full-fledged management plan and a business plan that includes cost recovery to handle some share of operational expenses. Given the definition above for core facilities, an argument can be made that some share of facilities & administrative (F&A or "indirect") reimbursements should be expected to contribute to operational support of core facilities. In fact, although it is not often made explicit, the current institutional support of these core facilities, whether it comes from department, school, college, or other budgets, essentially constitutes this F&A reimbursement.
In specific cases, the Office of the Vice President for Research (OVPR) provides core facility support that should be considered F&A reimbursement (often through UGARF). Although OVPR would prefer to be able to provide as much support as needed to all core facilities, limited resources require OVPR to consider carefully the return on investment of this support, measured by the impact that can be made on research progress (which often results in increased research support).
This document describes the planning that must be done by a core facility to allow OVPR to evaluate the potential return on any investment.
Before OVPR will consider supporting an existing or new core facility, the following documents must be supplied:
Any resulting OVPR support will then come with agreement from the core facility management to provide annual reports of core facility performance, measured against these plans. OVPR is prepared to offer help in preparing these planning documents. Of course, even for core facilities that do not request OVPR support, these planning documents represent a set of "best practices" that should help ensure the viability of the core facility.
[1-2 pages]
The strategic plan describes why the products/services provided by the core facility are necessary for research progress. This would answer questions like:
[1-2 pages including organizational chart]
Provide an organizational chart and job descriptions of all personnel associated with the facility.
[1-2 pages including spreadsheet of costs/income]
Note that UGA has a Service Center Policy.
All core facilities are required to comply with this policy, and the business plan should state how the core facility is in compliance. Most importantly, no UGA core facility can make a profit or loss, nor can they be construed as being in unfair competition with legitimate business concerns. On the other hand, viable core facilities are expected to demonstrate their value to the research community. This is evidenced by the willingness of researchers to pay for products/services, with this income offsetting expenses, according to the business plan.
The business plan will be evaluated on how well it answers questions such as:
The business plan should attempt to project the future demand and the resulting cost recovery. Given this expected income, estimate the subsidy (including state-funded salaries) required to operate break-even. As part of the return on investment analysis, we will expect user-fee income to contribute significantly to cost recovery.
The following outline provides a framework to analyze costs and income. Please list all costs incurred, regardless of how they will be handled. For income, define how products/services will be offered (what units at what unit price), and match the projected income from a sales forecast with income funding for costs.
An Excel template is provided to help you organize this analysis of costs and income. Appendix A provides instructions for its use.
Fixed Costs
Variable costs
Rate structure
Sales forecast
If this is an existing facility, report on past performance, including:
Essentially, in addition to a narrative about performance and users, you should re-create the business plan spreadsheet to reflect past fiscal performance.
Core facilities that receive financial support from OVPR are subject to the following annual reporting requirements. The deadline for receipt of report is 31 March:
1 Narrative
1.1 Brief summary of facility, products and services provided, user community
1.2 Detail any changes to the facility's Strategic Plan
2 Current Management Plan
2.1 Organizational Chart
2.2 Current position assignments
2.3 Explanation of any changes
3 Business Plan
3.1 Spreadsheet projecting current fiscal year (about to end), including current rate structure
(an update of this spreadsheet is due on 1 August with actual fiscal year revenue, expenses)
3.2 Spreadsheet projecting next fiscal year revenue and expenses, including future rate structure
3.3 Explanation describing projections, including justification of any changes to rate structure
Appendix A. Instructions for Use of Core Facility Business Plan Spreadsheet Template
Download the Excel spreadsheet template.
The template is designed to record annual costs (debits) as well as contributions and income (credits). For new facilities (or new requests), you should plan to project three years of operations, filling out one copy of this template per fiscal year (07/01 – 06/30). Otherwise, follow the business plan reporting in section 5 Reporting Requirements. Rename the document with the name of your core facility and which fiscal year it represents (e.g., PAMS_FY2010.xls; fiscal years are named for the calendar year in which they end). For existing facilities, also supply one template with actual costs and income from the most recent fiscal year (see section 4 Past Performance).