Provsion of Research Award Management System

Tender description

In line with Reg 41 of the Public Contracts (Scotland) Regulations 2015 the University, prior to commencing a live procurement process, is using this notice to support Preliminary market consultation. The University of Strathclyde (UOS) seeks notes of interest from suppliers able to provide a modern comprehensive end to end award management system that as a minimum can support the costing and pricing of research and knowledge exchange projects. The University's costing, pricing and development of research and knowledge exchange projects is currently managed by 3 separate systems: -Costing and Pricing Module (CPM) from Unit 4, FMS for pre-award Research costing and pricing. -In-house solution for Knowledge Exchange costing: The KE Information Management system is used to produce costings for consultancy, services, expert witnesses, training, CPD, short course, publication, public engagement and facility / equipment access. -In-house solution for managing lifecycle and post-award finances: The Strathclyde Award Management is used to manage full lifecycle and post award finances of research projects; applications, award and project data is then shared with other systems (Pure, Agresso Finance[Unit 4 ERP], iTrent [not currently live but expected before this new system is in place] other in-house systems, FMS). The University is conducting this Preliminary market consultation to help inform future sourcing options for a solution that unifies the separate systems above. The new system will also have to integrate with our financial, research systems (Unit 4 Cloud and Pure) and internal systems for corporate management information. This will require the update and/or development of data integrations using modern API technology. The new system should be a cloud-based platform and hosted by the supplier and the University will require the supporting implementation services, training and ongoing maintenance & support. Lot 1: Summary of main technical requirements: The University requires a system with the functionality to: -Allow a user (academic, research office, or other user) to create new records for project costings with a unique identifier. -Use workflow within the system to progress projects through approval process(es). The approver should be able to approve of return a project, providing comments. -Costing and pricing based on UK Government guidelines for implementation of TRAC and FEC, in accordance with funder quality assurance. -Calculate staff costs based on pre-defined salary scales and salaries of staff listed in the HR system, both on the basis of actual and banded salary. -Currency conversion. -Pricing of projects derived from the cost and/or funder settings. -Define user roles, types, access permissions and edit rights for users. -Reporting functionality or back-end reporting from database. -Number of system users: 850 (reviewers only 150) -Number of research and KE proposals: 1500* -Number of Contracts: 1500* -Number of Ethics applications*: 750 - Number of Export Control submissions: 700* * new annually In addition to the core specification, the university would like to be informed of other functionality e.g. Contracts Management, Ethics, Peer Review, Document storage (version control) that would be supplied with the proposed system. Our implementation timeframe is driven by our need to deliver a new solution for pre-award Research Costing and Pricing. Our aim is to deliver this by Summer 2026. (for the costing and pricing functionality). The additional functionalities (Contracts Management, Ethics, Peer Review) could be implemented by Summer 2027.