California Sea Grant College Program funds vital marine science research at academic institutions throughout California. Based at the University of California, San Diego, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, California Sea Grant is the largest of 30 programs in the United States and Puerto Rico. And essential to organizing the data which accumulates as part of the grant process is FileMaker Pro, the award–winning database software application from FileMaker Inc.

Business Challenge

Before any marine research project can begin, the first diver gets wet, or the first sample collected — it comes down to paperwork. And there's lots of it. As Sea Grant programmer/analyst Georgia Ratcliffe states, "We process research grant proposals from the preliminary stage through formal proposal submission, merit reviews, budgeting, fund allocation, historical tracking, and post–award reporting."

Every stage of that process is subject to close examination by advisors and external peers, and every bit of that information needs to be accessible. For years that was a problem. "We had huge amounts of information stored in dusty notebooks," Georgia recalls. "It was hard to access, and not available to multiple users, and made our proposal process that much longer and more complicated. We needed a database to make that information available to more people, and to allow us to present that information in many ways and easily generate necessary reports."

Successful Solution

"We began with FileMaker Pro in 1992," Georgia continues, "and when FileMaker Pro Server became available we began using that as well. It's made our operations much smoother. I created a 'Main Menu' interface for users, which made it easier for them to locate and use the data they needed, and to open multiple data windows at the same time. Now we have a total of 48 databases running on the server, each containing anywhere from 200 to 5000 records."

FileMaker Pro allows our users to learn how to make their own layouts to retrieve data needed for reports. It's easy to teach users the basics, and this lets them get up and running faster.

— Georgia Ratcliffe, Programmer/Analyst, California Sea Grant