Research equipment booking made easier
28 Sep 2026
PPMS joins the Connect family this week so colleagues can get timely help, track their request’s progress and access clearer guidance – making you and our University organised for success.
Customer support for PPMS, the University’s research equipment booking software, joins the Connect family this week, a move which provides administrators and users with significant improvements to how the platform is managed, maintained and utilised.
By moving PPMS support to Connect, the University’s online support portal, we are supporting Manchester 2035, by making it easier for researchers to get timely help, track the progress of their requests, and access clearer guidance so they can spend less time navigating support processes and more time focusing on their research.
This change is the culmination of several months’ work by a number of Professional Services teams to make PPMS more robust and reliable for both the University and our funders and partners.
The work, which is being delivered by One Research Facility in collaboration with the University’s finance, integrations, Research IT and IT Services teams, has involved improving integrations between key University systems including BlackDackel, Pure and Oracle Financials. The teams have also reviewed and improved the processes that are used to synchronise the data.
Foundational fixes
PPMS is a vital tool for the University’s research community:
- Researchers use it to book access to research equipment,
- It records how much time equipment is used for, and which projects that use should be charged against,
- Provides documentary evidence that enables the University to recover all of the research income it’s entitle to from funders.
Since February, a series of planned improvements have ensured that PPMS is more robust and reliable. These include:
- Improving the bi-directional data flow between PPMS and Oracle Financials,
- Increasing the number of people who are familiar with the data synchronisation process,
- Enabled data synchronisations to be completed remotely.
Taken together this work has given the University the confidence to move support for PPMS to the Connect system, safe in the knowledge that the system is well understood and well maintained.
Support step-up
Before this change, support requests for PPMS were made via an email inbox.
The move to Connect:
- Provides users with visibility of how a request is progressing.
- Enables the PPMS team to process requests more efficiently.
- Provides key information to the University to help inform future resource planning and procurement decisions.
Using the Connect portal to manage support requests is only one part of the improved support for PPMS. Ahead of the move to Connect, the team analysed the inbox to identify the most common help requests. A series of Knowledge Articles were prepared that provide users with help and advice that should enable them to resolve the majority of issues themselves, but if not the Connect portal is still there to access specialist support.
Users have already started to use the new system during an extended soft launch period and are benefitting from the improved process.
What’s next?
The PPMS team are working with Future Foundations to ensure that ongoing improvements are included in during 2027.
Alongside ongoing improvements to PPMS the team are working with Future Foundations to ensure that data flows are maintained when Oracle Fusion Cloud is launched towards the end of the year.
Work is also planned to make the TRAC costing process more transparent with easier visibility of standard and non-standard rates across BlackDackel, Pure, PPMS and Oracle.
The team is also working to develop Power BI dashboards to provide at-a-glance insights into how PPMS is functioning.
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