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Case study

A $190M research enterprise, run on spreadsheets

New Jersey Institute of Technology is an R1 research university managing over $190 million in annual research expenditures, focused on life sciences and engineering, sustainable systems, data science and information technology, and transdisciplinary work. In 2016 it was routing proposals by hand.

  • 30 → 4days to collect investigator, chair and dean approvals
  • +46%increase in external research funding
  • R1designation achieved in 2019
  • $190M+annual research expenditures

Before

Untenable, and growing

NJIT managed its research on manual routing, spreadsheets and shadow databases. That was workable once. It stopped being workable as the volume of research grew, and the problem was not any single broken process — it was that nothing connected to anything else.

  • Investigator routing and approval averaging 30 days per proposal
  • IRB protocol submission, committee review and committee communication conducted entirely in PDFs and email
  • Conflict-of-interest disclosure and review inconsistent and difficult to track
  • Reporting across all of it virtually non-existent

What they implemented

One system, seven modules, two integrations

NJIT selected Streamlyne Research in 2016 and now runs a single cohesive system for research administration.

  • Pre-award
  • Negotiations
  • Award
  • Subaward
  • IRB
  • COI
  • Reporting

Banner, both directions

Integrations to and from Banner Finance, and from Banner HR, keep user access, investigator profiles, key budgeting data, sponsor data and post-award details synchronised without human intervention. That last phrase is the whole point: the data stays correct because nobody has to remember to copy it.

After

Four days, and a designation

NJIT achieved R1 designation in 2019, three years after implementation. Research software does not earn a university its Carnegie classification — the research does that. What the software changed was how much of the office's time went into administering the work rather than doing it.

  • Approvals from investigators, chairs and deans complete in four days instead of thirty
  • Project-based COI disclosures assigned, completed and reviewed in the system, consistently against NIH and NSF guidelines
  • IRB processes automated end to end
  • Detailed compliance and sponsored-projects metrics available to officials through Streamlyne Reporting — for the first time in the university's history

Since implementing Streamlyne Research, NJIT has seen a 46% increase in external research funding, and internal routing for proposal approvals dropped from30 days to four.

NJIT has realised significant efficiencies and reliability through the combination of Streamlyne Research and the AWS cloud architecture it runs on.

Figures and outcomes on this page are the ones NJIT published with us. We have not extrapolated beyond them, and we have not attributed a quotation to anyone at the university.

Thirty days is not a law of nature.

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