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Research Administration System

Kansas State University is partnering with Cayuse LLC, a leader in electronic research administration software, to streamline and increase transparency into our research administration processes.

  • We already use the Cayuse 424 system-to-system solution, which facilitates proposal submission into Grants.gov.

  • We are purchasing the companion product Cayuse Sponsored Projects (Cayuse SP), which provides a centralized system with cloud storage for all project records with easy access for research administrators as well as for principal investigators.

  • Cayuse SP allows users to view all proposals and awards associated with a project and detailed tracking of both awards and subawards. It is easy to find the many documents that are part of a funded project and the system offers multiple reporting options. Cayuse SP includes electronic routing of documents as well and allows data integration with other institutional systems such as financial and human resource systems.

Implementation

Implementation of Cayuse SP will be led by staff from the Office of the Vice President for Research, or OVPR, in coordination with Cayuse personnel. The OVPR team will work in consultation with satellite research administration units from around campus as well as IT personnel and other systems specialists. 

The implementation process is expected to take six to seven months, with an additional two-month formal rollout to the campus community.

  • Discovery Phase: October — January 2019. During this phase, Cayuse will learn about K-State's current and desired business processes during weekly focus sessions and a multiday onsite visit.

  • User Acceptance Testing: January 2019 — April 2019. This phase begins when Cayuse provides access to TRAIN (training instance of Cayuse SP) that has been populated with K-State users, departments, sponsors, institutional data, and initial configurations. This phase provides an opportunity for hands-on review and refinement and requires consistent, frequent, and open communication.

  • Closeout: May 2019. The phase will give K-State an opportunity to conduct quality assurance testing on the production instance of Cayuse SP and final testing of desired processes before opening the system to the full campus. 

  • Rollout: June 2019 — July 2019. K-State staff will lead the rollout of Cayuse SP and provide hands-on training sessions for the campus community. 

Agreement and integration

The agreement with Cayuse offers the chance for Kansas State University to be a development partner for future releases of Cayuse SP. We also have agreed to work with Cayuse on plans to integrate Cayuse 424 product with Pivot, which we also have purchased. Pivot is a sponsored research opportunity management and researcher profile solution. These efforts will occur alongside the Cayuse SP implementation.

This agreement marks the end of a long process of recognizing that we have multiple legacy systems that we use for research administration, which result in a process requiring multiple entries of the same data into systems that cannot communicate with one another. These were enumerated by the Electronic Research Administration Task Force that worked in 2016-17, but the need for systems integration has been called out by several previous groups including the Research Infrastructure Task Force in 2010 and the RSCAD (Theme I) subgroup of K-State 2025 planning. The purchase of Cayuse SP is a very important step toward a full, comprehensive, electronic research administration system.