Grants Management System

From: David Tirrell, Provost; Charlie Lane, Vice President and Chief Operating Officer

Dear Caltech Community,

After a thorough internal review process, Caltech has selected Huron Consulting Group to streamline its proposal and award processes, to better support federal compliance requirements, and to provide PIs with more easily accessible information about the status of their proposals and awards.  The project will launch this month, and we expect the implementation process to take approximately one year.

The scope of the project includes automating several currently manual processes, including proposal routing and approval (and associated forms, e.g., DAF, MORA, PI eligibility), award intake and processing, subaward requests and processing, unfunded agreements, facilities use/technical service agreement requests and processing, as well as a PI Dashboard.  The system will also act as a repository for all documents processed through it.  Implementation will include integrations with several Caltech systems, including Human Resources, Oracle Financial System, Disclosure of Financial Interests and Commitments, and Human and Animal Protocol Tracking.  Huron has experience implementing its software at many of the top research institutions in North America, and we look forward to their partnership.

This project will be overseen by a steering committee led by Charlie Lane and Kaushik Bhattacharya, and an implementation working group with representation from each division, which will be led by David Mayo, Senior Director for Research Administration; the working group will perform the bulk of the effort of advising on configuration and testing.

The process will begin with an onboarding phase during which the implementation working group members will each become familiar with the Huron software as it operates out of the box.  From that baseline, the working group will proceed with advising on configuration changes that will support those business processes that will integrate into the Huron system.  Concurrently, IMSS will be working with Huron to establish the necessary integrations with the Caltech system.  There will be extensive user acceptance testing opportunities as well as training options as we get close to our go-live date.  We will update the campus regularly via a new project website planned to launch soon.

This project is an exciting opportunity to improve processes on campus, and we recognize it will require effort, hard work, and teamwork.  We appreciate everyone's willingness to take on this challenge as we work through the implementation.