The University of South Alabama Enables Growth with Cayuse

Challenge

The University of South Alabama is a public research university encompassing ten separate colleges and schools across southern Alabama, including a College of Medicine. USA is currently classified as a high research activity R2 doctoral university, with aspirations to achieve R1 status in the near future.

The university’s decentralized campus structure means that the central office for sponsored research must work closely with the geographically dispersed colleges and departments to submit and prepare proposals and manage other essential research activities. However, the existing manual administrative processes created headaches and obstacles that needed to be resolved to meet USA’s goals for research growth.

“Everybody was very paper-oriented,” Assistant Vice President for Sponsored Projects Administration Jennifer Mills recalled, adding that “it was a very physical process of having to move literal paperwork to be reviewed.”

The reliance on paper created unnecessary delays and communication issues, as documents needed to be individually scanned, digitized, and emailed for submissions and approvals. According to Jennifer, this made it “harder to work with each other, even on the same campus.”

The school used an Access database to centralize documents, but the system had severe limitations. For one, the database did not prevent the upload of duplicate entries, creating uncertainty around versioning and accuracy, as well as redundant data. Creating reports, a key goal for the database system, was also a time-consuming process, and Access could not easily produce the level of detail administrators desired.

To complicate matters further, the departments and colleges had different processes and requirements for workflows, documentation, and reporting. This not only made collaboration more difficult, but also complicated hiring and onboarding for new hires who needed to learn how to navigate non-standardized processes. As Jennifer put it, “researchers don’t want to come to a campus that doesn’t have the infrastructure to back up what they’re doing.”

“The antiquated system was inherently uncollaborative. The administrative foundation was built on decentralized paper processes and required wet signatures for all approvals. This created excessive manual effort, effectively punishing interdisciplinary research by making cross-unit collaboration too procedurally burdensome to sustain.”
Assistant Vice President, Sponsored Projects Administration

Solution

With these issues in mind, leadership sought a better pre-award management system that could, at the very least, replace paper-based processes, centralize workflows and records, improve cross-department and cross-campus communications, and enhance reporting.

After considering different options, the university implemented Cayuse Sponsored Projects and Proposals (S2S) to provide the modern digital infrastructure needed to eliminate paper-based systems and promote research growth.

“There’s no way this office would have been able to continue to grow without a system like Cayuse.”
Assistant Vice President, Sponsored Projects Administration

For her part, Jennifer was familiar with Cayuse from a previous role at a different research university and understood that it would be able to achieve USA’s desired results, and more. In addition to reducing administrative burdens, she knew that a digital, single source of truth would prevent conflicting information from appearing in the system and even ease training, as she had seen in her previous position.

Results

With Sponsored Projects and Proposals (S2S) implemented and rolled out across USA’s campuses, researchers and administrators have seen several improvements to collaboration, pre-award project management, reporting, and even hiring. 

Better organization, workflows, and collaboration

Where teams previously struggled with organizational silos and keeping consistent data, Cayuse provided a single electronic system for handoffs and record-keeping that helped to unify teams and facilitate easier communication. Once-inconsistent processes were standardized and improved with Sponsored Projects and Proposals (S2S)’s configurable workflows, helping to reduce confusion and increase consistency across departments and campuses. 

As a decentralized university, the additional transparency that digital logins and dashboards provide helps PIs, administrators, and other stakeholders see where everything stands at every step of the pre-award process. For the Office of Sponsored Projects, this means significantly less time spent fielding questions and status update requests from individuals who can now quickly find answers directly in Cayuse.

“When you’re able to develop processes around one standing system and the operation there, it puts everyone on the same page… It’s been nothing but more efficient.”
Assistant Vice President, Sponsored Projects Administration

When it comes to proposal management, “most people think of it as only at the submission or award stage,” Jennifer noted. However, Cayuse Proposals (S2S) has helped improve proposal management beyond simply submissions and awards. The data available within Cayuse helps to create a better, more detailed picture of the current state of research proposals and opportunities for improvement. According to Jennifer, “it’s helpful to know what we’ve succeeded at, what we have not succeeded at, and what we haven’t even gone after,” as these details can steer teams to new opportunities and help emphasize wins.

Easily accessible data and reporting 

The wealth of reliable, useful data has also been useful for easier and more robust reporting. In the past, Jennifer needed to request data from individuals to help build reports, a time-consuming process that still missed essential information that would take even longer to find. With Cayuse, she can now perform granular searches on her own and build more detailed reports with far less effort. “As long as you put the information you want in Cayuse the way you need it,” she explained, “you’re going to be able to go back and get it for your reports.”

Attracting, training, and retaining staff

Hiring and onboarding have also seen improvements at USA thanks to Cayuse. The software serves as a competitive edge for potential new hires who may be weighing positions at multiple institutions. In Jennifer’s experience, many researchers “were attracted to USA because we were smaller, but they didn’t want to give up the convenience of research management software systems.” The internal consistency and digital records available in Cayuse have also helped to onboard new hires, who are happy to see intuitive electronic workflows that can ease them into their new roles, as well as detailed histories for proposals that serve to maintain legacy knowledge.

As the University of South Alabama continues its pursuit of R1 classification, Cayuse is expected to keep facilitating the growth needed to achieve this goal. From breaking down organizational silos to improving proposal success and employee satisfaction, faculty are optimistic about the future with Cayuse.