Electronic Research Administration System Implementation and Support Services

The vendor is required to provide a comprehensive electronic research administration (era) system is designed to streamline and enhance the university's research administration processes, covering everything from proposal development to award management and closeout.
- Implement a comprehensive era system that will:
• Streamline the entire sponsored research lifecycle from proposal development through closeout.
• Improve proposal quality and submission timelines.
• Enhance compliance with sponsor and institutional requirements.
• Provide real-time visibility into proposal and award status.
• Enable robust reporting and analytics capabilities.
• Integrate with existing university financial and human resources (HR) systems.
• Reduce administrative burden on faculty and staff.
- Core research administration
• Full lifecycle research administration: support for the entire research administration lifecycle—from proposal development through award closeout— including electronic submissions to external sponsors. • The system must support system-to-system (s2s) submissions to grants.gov. 
• The university may continue using other sponsor-specific submission platforms to meet compliance requirements.
• Agreement management: capability to track and manage research-related agreements, with a dedicated module for routing and monitoring. 
• This module should integrate with the proposal module to ensure continuity across related records.
• Multi-year project management: functionality to track, manage, and approve multi-year projects, including support for post-award budget management, budget modifications, and forecasting processes.
• Researcher profiles: centralized profiles for researchers that include their personal, educational, and professional details, as well as research interests and past projects.
• Proposal development: tools to facilitate the creation, submission, and management of grant proposals, including templates, compliance checks, and electronic submission to funding agencies.
• External partner integration: support for managing collaborations with external institutions such as industry partners, universities, and government agencies.
• Routing and approvals: automated routing of proposals, protocols, and documents—including extra compensation requests—for review and approval by relevant stakeholders.
• Conflict of interest management: tracking and managing disclosures of financial interests, relationships, or conflicts related to research projects.
• Notifications and alerts: automated alerts for deadlines, approvals, status changes, required actions, and upcoming tasks for both researchers and compliance personnel.
• Subrecipient management: capabilities to track sub recipient risk assessments, collect audit reports, review invoices, document performance, and generate automated monitoring alerts.
• Effort reporting and certification: support for effort certification workflows for all grant-funded personnel, integrated with payroll records and aligned with institutional certification cycles.
• Invoicing and billing: tools to automate invoicing and billing processes.
• Audit support: features to support audits, including detailed audit trails and documentation tools.
• Financial forecasting and budgeting: tools to create and manage budgets, including cost calculations, indirect cost allocation, and budget categorization.
• Equipment disposition and closeout: workflows for equipment disposition and award closeout.
• FFATA reporting integration: support for federal funding accountability and transparency act (FFATA) reporting, including export files compatible with and API-based integrations.
• Cost sharing and matching funds: ability to track cost sharing and matching funds by type (cash, in-kind), source, and period, with system alerts for under- or over-reporting.
• Dashboards: real-time dashboards for administrators and researchers to monitor key metrics like proposal status, financials, and compliance.
• Data analytics: tools for analyzing data related to research activities, proposal success rates, compliance metrics, and more to inform strategic decision-making.
• Technical progress reporting: tools to track and submit technical progress reports, including configurable reminders, approval workflows, and document retention.
• Closeout management: checklists and deadline tracking for technical, financial, and property reporting requirements, with integrated alerts.
• Invention reporting: functionality to track and report inventions and intellectual property disclosures resulting from sponsored research. 
• The system should be configurable to meet university-specific requirements.
• Training tools: comprehensive user training modules, including tutorials and guides for researchers, administrators, and compliance officers.
• Data migration: migration of data from existing systems and processes.
• ERP integration: integration with the university's ellucian banner ERP system (including grants billing, pre-award, and compliance subsystems).
• Business process reengineering: support for business process discovery and reengineering, including the evaluation of existing research administration workflows—particularly those that are manual, paper-based, or undocumented. 
• The system must support alignment of institutional practices with system-enabled efficiencies through the identification of current-state processes, documentation of gaps, and recommendations for configuration or procedural improvements to reduce redundancy and streamline operations.
• Enterprise system integration: integration with university financial, HR, and other enterprise systems.
• Training record tracking: tools to track researcher training, including compliance and certification expiration, with integration to external platforms such as CITI. 
• The system should include a user-friendly dashboard to provide real-time visibility into training completion, upcoming expirations, and outstanding requirements at both individual and administrative levels.
- Contract Period/Term: 3 years
- Questions/Inquires Deadline: July 11, 2025