Northwestern University (NU) developed the NUcore platform beginning in 2010 as a centralized tool for the management of core facilities activity. NUcore is a transaction processing system that permits shared facilities to accept and track orders and to bill for their services. ALL core facilities at Northwestern use NUcore.
NUcore is designed to meet the needs of the three broad groups that it serves:
- Customers
NUcore allows customers to purchase items, request services and schedule instruments. Users can also log in to check order status, review current and previous charges, and manage their payment sources without the need to contact a core facility. - Core Directors and Staff
NUcore is specifically designed to reduce the administrative burden on facility managers and directors. Payment sources are validated to prevent billed items from failing to post in the financial system. Journals are assembled and transmitted electronically, without manual calculation or formatting. Real-time reports provide summaries based on common and user-defined parameters. - Department / Center / University Administrators
Specific roles within NUcore allow administrators to manage groups of users and payment sources. A COGNOS datamart also resides over the NUcore database, with direct connections to University reporting and data visualization tools. These interfaces provide advanced reporting across multiple facilities, precluding labor-intensive retrieval and collating of data.
NUcore remains under active development, with updates and new features released bi-weekly. New feature requests are prioritized by need – in most cases, features that benefit multiple cores will take precedence over requests that target a single core.