Contract for the provision of WORKTRIBE SAAS Agreement to the University of Birmingham

Tender description

Worktribe is a market leading software-as-service research management platform for research management. The suite provides a range of capabilities in use by the institution The Research Management has been developed from the ground up to help academics and administrators manage research activity from initial project conception to bid preparation, approval, submission and post-award. The functionality includes; Costing and pricing, Document management, Approvals workflow, Ethics and peer reviews, Contracts management, Structured assessment and management of benefits and risks. These modules provide a cloud-based software platform for higher education research and curriculum management across the entire research project lifecycle. Worktribe is integrated into the institutions Oracle Fusion Cloud (HR/Finance/Payroll system and separately the data warehouse. Lot 1: An end-to-end research lifecycle management consisting of the following: research pre-award, post-award and contracts products. UoB receives external funding to carry out academic research projects A very large proportion of this is won through competitive bids to funders, through charities, government bodies and industrial organisations. The process of submitting applications to funders, the receipt of award funding, tracking of the award through its lifecycle and invoicing of expenditure against the award is then carried out mainly by nominated staff. The management overhead on staff across the university in application and awards management is very large, and the need for communication and collaboration within the university is critical. In order to improve and streamline these processes as much as possible UoB has explored the market for Research Awards Management systems. These are systems that assist with "end-to-end" management of the awards process, from bid development through to project closure. Worktribe is a market-leading research management system. Through examination of the market and discussions with staff at other institutions, there appear to be few main options currently available for consideration. In addition since first procuring Worktribe the University has made a substantial investment in terms of integrations into the rest of the technical estate, working processes and staff training. As such, The University has decided to extend the maintenance contract for 3 years.