Frequently asked questions

Frequently asked questions

The Research Support website contains instructions for becoming a MARS user.

MARS is accessed using Single Sign-on (SSO) under the University’s Webauth system. Your Single Sign-on password can be changed on the Webauth website.

When you are authorised to use MARS, you are added to a specific department. On logging into MARS, you will see all data for your department. In addition, if you are the lead department in a collaboration, you will also see financial data for your collaborating departments. If you are a collaborating department and another department is leading, you will only see the financial data for your own department.

It is possible to be added to more than one department, in which case you will see data for all of your departments.

When you are authorised to use MARS, you are added to specific projects and top tasks. You may be added to all the top tasks in a project, or just one or two. On logging into MARS, you will see data for your own projects only, filtered by the top tasks to which you have been given access.

  • X5: every night
  • Oracle R12: weekly
  • CoreHR: monthly

This situation occurs because investigator names and FTE are imported from X5, and X5 is not kept up to date if this information changes. For example, a department investigator (say Dr John) is named on the project set-up page in X5 as lead investigator for his department. Subsequently in R12 he is replaced by another investigator (Prof Stella). Prof Stella will show on the MARS project page under 'Department Investigators'. However Prof Stella will not be associated with the project in the MARS investigators list, and will not appear on the investigators list (unless she is an investigator on another project). Instead Dr John will be on the investigators list, and when you click through to the investigator page for him, his FTE as set up in X5 will display on the chart.

This is because the FTE dates come from X5 and the announced end date is taken from Oracle. Some costings on X5 are ignored for FTE purposes, such as costing type SUP, and anything not approved by Research Accounts.

This occurs when an investigator allocation has been imported from X5, but a matching project has not been found in the Oracle Project Portfolio with Spend report. Therefore no financial values can be obtained. It can also occur when an investigator is working on a project in another department to which you do not have access.

There is no custom print from MARS, though it is possible to capture the web page as a pdf using browser plugins such as FireShot which is available in both Chrome and FireFox. See guidance on the Printing from MARS page.