Stephen F. Austin State University Frees Essential Resources with Cayuse

Challenge

When Stephen F. Austin State University joined the University of Texas system in the fall of 2023, faculty were excited about the expected changes over the coming years. With a graduate student population of just over 1,200 students and a grant portfolio of $15 million, the move to the UT system offered the relatively small school an excellent opportunity to assess options for optimizing and expanding externally funded research and grant programs. 

“They told us we need to commit resources, personnel, whatever we can to help grow [these programs],” said Jennifer Hanlon Patterson, Director of Research and Sponsored Programs at SFA, “and our new dean is very much on board with determining what resources can we provide if we do not have them.”

Fortunately, the university was already on track to free up essential resources, having begun transitioning to Cayuse’s electronic management solutions in 2021.

Before 2021, administrators in SFA’s research and sponsored programs department relied on a mix of manual and disconnected digital systems including Excel and FileMaker Pro, with most submissions and approvals dependent on paper-based systems. 

“That was a very excruciating, painful process,” Jennifer recalls. She detailed how every proposal, form, and document required separate paperwork, resulting in frequent delays due to missing information, communication difficulties, and an overall lack of transparency for researchers and administrators. 

To start the proposal submission process, for example, “you had to be here on campus unless you wanted to scan or fax everything in,” something that would be difficult for those in the field without easy access to a fax or scanner. 

The IRB team similarly experienced issues with reliance on paper and single-owner digital documents: only one person, the IRB Chair, had access to a spreadsheet used to track everything. “That meant if somebody was absent, or if that IRB chair was gone, then no one else had access to do anything.”

Solution

SFA’s interest in Cayuse began at a research industry trade show, where attendees from SFA realized that a vendor-provided electronic research administration (eRA) solution could support better management processes.

Jennifer recalls a specific workshop at the event where she spoke directly with the presenter about how Cayuse works and whether it could help SFA simplify research management. “He pulls out his cell phone and logs into Cayuse and I was like, ‘wait, seriously, you can do that on your cell phone?’” The benefits were obvious: “I immediately thought of all of our faculty or in the field in the summer… They would no longer have to go back to their hotel or track down a fax machine to try to send something.”

After looking further into the Cayuse Research Suite in the following months, it became clear that the software’s benefits matched the university’s expectations for a better management system. 

According to Jennifer, “The transparency element really made us consider an online cloud system, because with paper processes faculty would not know when [a submission] got to the office; there were a lot of phone calls and emails.”

SFA started transitioning to an online management system with Cayuse Sponsored Projects and Proposals (S2S) to help facilitate research proposal submissions and oversight, followed by Human Ethics for IRB management, then Fund Manager and Project Effort for improved financial and effort reporting after the move to the UT system.

Results

The switch from manual and piecemeal digital systems to Cayuse has been an enormous boon for researchers and administrators at SFA, and faculty were largely impressed by the new user experience.  

“When we launched [Cayuse], we had all the training planned out and we thought, ‘you know, it’s going to be a while before we start seeing people use the system.’” Jennifer remembers. However, the system was so intuitive that “Within that first week, we had over a dozen applications for our internal grant program, and the majority of the faculty members had not even gone to the training!”

When comparing the current management practices to the opaque and time-consuming status quo of the past, Jennifer notes that “Cayuse solved several of those issues; people are not wasting their time, running around and trying to track down the paperwork.”

“In the past,” she continues, “we would not know that people were working on a grant until maybe the paperwork showed up.” Now, the relevant administrators are notified as soon as someone starts a record in Cayuse. “That has helped us as far as the timing and when we get involved with proposals.”

Thanks to Cayuse’s user-friendly and straightforward interface, Jennifer’s department is also fielding fewer support calls and emails, freeing up time to focus on other tasks. Added transparency also gave non-administrative staff more appreciation for the work administrators do. “I think faculty and staff are starting to see there’s a lot more expertise from our office than maybe they had noticed in the past: We actually are all well-trained in what we do, and we can offer a lot more guidance and support with putting proposals together than just helping them out with paperwork.”

Beyond the expected benefits of transparency and reduced turnaround times, there were also several unexpected benefits to adopting Cayuse. For example, the implementation process gave administrators a chance to reassess and simplify their processes and procedures, such as unnecessary questions or unneeded forms. “We got rid of quite a few extra pieces of paper because we realized they were not really integral to what we need to approve a proposal.”

“We asked for feedback too, during our training sessions from faculty,” Jennifer added, “So we were able to get a lot of feedback from them to help create the best system that we could for their purposes and ours.”

The Office of Research and Sponsored Programs has also been consistently impressed by Cayuse’s customer support. “Everybody responds very quickly, everybody’s very timely, and if they don’t know how to fix something, they very quickly will pass you on to the next person and they keep you involved in all of that,” Jennifer says, “which I find gratifying in a way, because I think with so many different companies these days, you’re used to a response of ‘well, I can’t help you.’”

The subject matter expertise of Cayuse employees also makes a huge difference for SFA: “almost everybody we’ve worked with has been in the grants field in one way or another; so it’s not just knowledge of the product, but knowledge of what we do in the grants landscape.”

Jennifer notes that the university expects an additional drastic workload reduction when Fund Manager goes live for similar reasons. “It’s a much more user-friendly system than some of the other finance systems because [other systems are] made for the financial people who understand the difference between debits and credits and revenues and everything else,” Jennifer stated, adding that the university’s implementation team appreciates that Fund Manager’s interface presents expenditures and budgets without additional accounting data that is not as helpful to faculty and staff.