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Description

Background: Faculty affairs and development offices frequently lack proper tools to quickly and accurately complete data-related tasks. While far from best practice, Excel is often the only tool available to teams to track faculty academic appointment history and contact information. Goal: To build a custom faculty management system that transforms our Excel-based faculty data into accurate, integrated data while avoiding excessive costs of external data system solutions. Approach: We built our own cloud-based faculty management data system that integrates with other institutional data systems and automates collection and reporting of faculty onboarding, appointment, and promotion data using Microsoft’s Model Driven Power Apps (MDPA). MDPA is a low-/no-code software that provides a secure Excel-like experience with advantages of cloud connectivity, database structure, form development, and a drag-and-drop user interface to enable rapid custom builds. Outcomes: We will share our newly-designed faculty management system, automations that reduce manual work, how we built the system, reports we created, and costs involved. Implications: In our experience, MDPA is a simple yet cost-effective solution to reduce repetitive data tasks, decrease errors, and speed up data processing tasks, such as onboarding and appointment tracking, in a data system Faculty Affairs teams can design and manage themselves.

Publication Date

4-2026

When and Where Presented

Presented at the AAMC 2026 Group on Business Affairs (GBA), Group on Institutional Planning (GIP), Group on Faculty Affairs (GFA) Joint Meeting, St. Louis, Mo., April 22-24, 2026.

Building a Better Faculty Management System: Insights from One Institution’s Experience

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