Given the current federal climate with potential funding freezes, heightened competition, and increased uncertainty, research administration professionals are more focused than ever on efficiency, transparency, and strategic positioning.
This guide aims to highlight several relevant questions research teams should consider when working with system SaaS providers to navigate this new environment, and how the Cayuse Research Suite addresses these common concerns:
Funding Stability & Strategies
Q: How can your system help us identify and pursue alternative funding sources (e.g. foundations, industry partners)?
A: Cayuse makes it easier to diversify your funding strategy by helping you discover, track, and apply for opportunities beyond traditional federal grants. With Cayuse Fund Finder, you can:
- Ease the search for alternative funding sources through Fund Finder’s automated search engine
- Use advanced search filters to find matches aligned with your research priorities
- Tap into more than Federal grant databases with opportunities across foundations, state, and private corporations
- Build alerts so your team can apply for funding early and accurately
Q: Does the platform help us prioritize high-impact or at-risk projects during funding uncertainty?
A: Yes! Cayuse gives you and your team the transparency and data management tools you need to make smart, timely decisions when budgets are tight or uncertain. With Cayuse, you can:
- Get real-time project visibility into funding status, milestones, and task completion for all projects in one place
- Identify projects with approaching deadlines, approval delays, or even compliance risks
- Ensure congruence checks between research and applications align with approved IACUC protocols
- Filter based on specific criteria or keywords that are important to flag and identify for internal stakeholders
- Generate reports for your department or institutional leadership to ensure transparency for all project status and budgets
Data for Strategic Decision-Making
Q: How can your platform support data-driven decisions for resource allocation and workload balancing?
A: Cayuse equips your team with the insights needed to allocate time, funding, and personnel where they are needed most. With one source of truth for all your research activity, you can eliminate guesswork and confusion around proposal status and progress.
Cayuse allows you to plan smarter, using reports and dashboards that will help you and your team highlight resource usage and any possible gaps when looking to close out a project. Whether you are optimizing across departments or reallocating, your team will always have the data you need to keep research projects moving forward.
Operational Efficiency & Cost Savings
Q: How much time or cost savings have peer institutions seen using your platform?
A: Institutions that adopt Cayuse as their research administration platform have reported significant time and cost savings, increasing efficiencies to reduce waste and delays:
- On average, users save 40 hours per week in time spent tracking down reviews and approvals and building manual reports
- Cayuse helps catch errors before you submit for a 99.9% proposal submission success rate, saving time spent fixing errors and resubmitting
Overall our clients report that using Cayuse has improved staff capacity, with many institutions reallocating administrative time to higher-value strategic initiatives.
Q: Can the system help us streamline workflows and eliminate manual processes?
A: Absolutely! Cayuse is built to modernize and streamline research administration by replacing paper-based and manual processes with automated workflows that are configurable to your institution’s needs. Examples of how Cayuse can help optimize workflows include:
- Smart routing to ensure proposal submissions are submitted to the right reviewer and approver accurately and on time
- Real-time status tracking so every team member has transparency into what is needed next and who is responsible for each task
- Built-in risk and compliance tracking that proactively flags missing or inaccurate information
These automation and tracking capabilities enable Cayuse to free up your administrative and research staff to focus on the research that matters most.
Q: How does your system help support teams that are short-staffed or under-resourced?
A: We design and build our software with efficiency, scalability, and compliance in mind, making it the ideal solution for teams operating with limited staff or constrained budgets. Cayuse supports your teams by:
- Automating repetitive administrative tasks
- Reducing data entry duplication that drains your resources
- Consolidating communication and documentation
- Providing reporting tools and dashboards
Cayuse works to improve your team’s capacity to allow them to get back to making a difference.
Risk Management & Compliance Continuity
Q: How does your platform minimize compliance risks?
A: Cayuse’s built-in workflows, automated audit trails, and real-time tracking across every stage of the research lifecycle work together to significantly reduce compliance risks and increase oversight. Cayuse enables researchers to keep documentation up-to-date and reduce manual errors with more efficient process workflows. Centralizing your data in Cayuse’s cloud-based platform gives teams optimal transparency, helping them identify and resolve potential issues before submission.
Q: How can we ensure timely and uninterrupted compliance reviews and approvals if staff turnover increases?
A: The Cayuse Research Suite helps institutions maintain continuity even during staffing changes. Cayuse supports the entire research administration lifecycle by centralizing workflows, automating routing and notifications, and enabling role-based access.
With institution specific processes built into the platform, new staff can get up to speed quickly while reviews and approvals continue without disruption. The Cayuse implementation process also provides a great opportunity to re-assess and simplify workflows to help ease training for new hires. Cayuse also keeps compliance activities and statuses up-to-date in real-time so your team can spend less time worrying if they are missing a key submission field and more time focused on the research work that truly matters.
Stakeholder Communication & Transparency
Q: Does your platform support clear, centralized communication with PIs and leadership during volatile funding periods?
A: Definitely! Implementing the Cayuse Suite across your institution will improve transparency and communication with:
- Real-time dashboards for at-a-glance visibility into project status
- Automated task notifications and reminders so you never miss a review or approval
- Role-based access to ensure the right team members can retrieve to what they need, when they need it
- Robust data insights so you can quickly view information that your teams need with configurable dashboards and reporting capabilities
Q: Can we provide stakeholders with real-time visibility into project status?
A: Many organizations use Cayuse for proposal status and tracking, but also to simplify regulatory compliance so their research and reputation are never compromised. With solutions for managing COI, IRB, IACUC, and IBC submissions and reviews, transparency with stakeholders ensures faster cross-committee reviews and approvals.
