The Royal College of Surgeons Ireland is exclusively a health sciences-focused educational and research institution. It is uniquely placed to drive translational research which benefits patients and the community. To streamline the research process, RCSI needed to implement a Research Grant System which, integrating with the existing systems can support and enhance the research activities undertaken by the staff and students at the University. They were looking for a modern, intuitive solution for the management of applications, awards and projects in a way that gives the support team full control over the workflow of entire life cycle. To further support the research function at the university, the system needed to automate the process of recruiting staff for the various research projects in a way that gave the PIs and administrators full control over the recruitment process. Furthermore, the planned new system would have to integrate with existing systems at the university such as finance, Student Management and HR. Migration of data from the existing system was another key point to be considered.

Challenges

• lack of automation for management of awards and projects.
• Lack of real time data about projects and ethics review
• No integration between the Grants process and the key existing systems.
• A specific need for research recruitment

Benefits

• Error-free Grant process
• Increased efficiency and collaboration
• Seamless process with full integration to existing systems

The Solution

Vidatum worked closely with key stakeholders at RCSI inidentifying the key requirements and process at theuniversity. The emphasis on the analysis phase of deliveryensured the successful delivery of the system.
Vidatum Projects’s intuitive and flexible design enabledthe research staff to fully manage the project lifecyclefrom pre-award to the post award and into the Ethicsand Compliance stages. The dashboards in the systemenabled user to have a real time view of all the datarelating to the projects at all stages, while generatingnotifications and tasks for the users, greatly increasingthe efficiency of the process.

The recruitment module allowed PIs to control theprocess of recruiting staff for their projects andautomatically generating contracts and other officialdocuments, it allowed them to concentrate on their keyresearch activity.
Full integration with Core HR and Quercus ensured aseamless transition into the new system. Vidatum alsodesigned a customised module for RCSI for therecruitment of researchers when needed for a grant.

Results

The grant preparation and submission process improvedsignificantly after the implementation of VidatumAcademic. The chance of errors in an application wasminimised; before implementation, applications weredone manually with the chance if human error. Now thatapplications are routed through the system, the marginof error is greatly reduced.
Team efficiency and collaboration was also positivelyaffected. For users, not having to manually enter allinformation and being able to view different parts of thegrant application simultaneously was a welcome changeto the process.