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- Please tell us about your reporting capabilities.
- How do you handle those non-competing renewals with NIH as to not look like duplicate submissions, but also preserve the competitiveness of the original award?
- Is there a way to receive an alert in the system that would notify the compliance office and PI when an email address becomes inactive?
- Please share a report from an RI customer that indicates the number of successful proposals submitted via S2S
- Will researchers be able to submit tasks/requests from Outlook? Can email threads/replies automatically be attached to the request?
- Do you have a way to initiate the MTA, NDA, Subaward agreements in the system?
- What format of current and pending do you generate?
- Is there a place to house documentation on payment for reconciliation purposes?
- Comments were made about the S2S and Grants.gov, Fastlane being phased out and potentially not supported in the products. WVU has heard differently, and we would like clarification.
- How long does it take for the development environment to be created and ready to go?
- Can you provide an overview of the maturity of all modules you have proposed for WVU?
- When will the Agreement Module be released or when was it released, any planned enhancements and when?
Please tell us about your reporting capabilities.
The Huron Research Suite provides a variety of tools at multiple architectural levels to provide reports to end users, administrative staff, and executives. Any data field stored in the system can be included in reports, and we provide the following reporting tools:
Custom Search
HRS provides a built-in reporting capability called “Custom Search” where queries can be created, edited, and saved by authorized users at your institution via a browser-based interface. Custom searches support a variety of display modes, including as filter-able listing-style reports, drill-through charts/graphs, as well as scorecards.
Listing Style
Graphical Display
Tile/Scoreboard Style
Document Merge Extracts
Examples include the creation of Microsoft Excel documents from the system (e.g., spreadsheet budget export), Adobe .pdf documents (e.g. SF-424, Agreements or IRB document finalization/watermarking) and Microsoft Word documents (e.g., IACUC regulatory reports).
Analytical and Summary Reports
Examples include turn-around time reports; complex formatted reports and analytical capabilities.
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Can you get success rates for proposals (by sponsor, dollar amount, department etc.)?
Yes, the following is an example of a delivered Microsoft SSRS report which reports on Proposals and Awards by Department:
Fig. 8: Analytical and Summary Reports Within our financial reporting, we also report on conversion rates – which factors the awarded dollar values versus what was requested in the proposal – in addition to basic awarded/not-awarded success rates.
Fig. 9: Analytical and Summary Reports This information can also be visualized using BI tools such as Tableau. The below screenshot displays information that is natively captured by Huron Grants, and the report is pulling data from Standard SQL Views included in the product:
Fig. 10: Dashboard showing sample data. -
Can you keep track of primary sponsor (instead of just the lead organization)?
Yes, Huron Grants collects both direct sponsor as well as prime sponsor (the originating source of project funding).
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How about reporting based on co-PI?
Huron Grants allows for recording of co-PI as part of the creation of a Funding Proposal (and an Award). While our delivered reports do not include a specific report on co-PIs, because the data is available, it can be reported on.
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Can the system track cost share commitments and/or effort of PIs?
How do you handle those non-competing renewals with NIH as to not look like duplicate submissions but also preserve the competitiveness of the original award?
Huron has a specific process for non-competing continuations/renewals. In this process, you click the Create Continuation button on the award which creates a special funding proposal type with a default name of the original award with the word “Continuation” added (for example, “Simms RADIUS R01 – Continuation”). This is a separate submission. The original proposal is not changed. This separate submission goes through the same approval and submission steps as any other funding proposal. When the continuation proposal reaches the Awarded state, the grants manager/specialist assigned to the award creates a continuation-type award modification and adds the funds the sponsor has released for the next budget period.
Is there a way to receive an alert in the system that would notify compliance office and PI when an email address becomes inactive?
Yes, there is a way to configure the system to notify the compliance office of invalid emails. Huron does not “monitor” the accuracy or active/inactive status of an email. However, the system does allow the configuration of the “from” address on system-generated emails, and this can be configured to be the email address of the compliance office. Email systems (including Huron’s email server) will auto-reply to undeliverable messages with a failure notice. The result would be, when a user has an inactive email address, the system notifies the sender (the configured compliance office email) of the failure, and the body of that email would include both the invalid email address, as well as the original emails subject line (e.g. “Study0000142: Please follow-up on congruency”).
Please share a report from an R1 customer that indicates the number of successful proposals submitted via S2S - you can hide the name of the institution.
To help audit our support for S2S submission, Huron frequently (4-5 times per year) downloads all available funding opportunities on grants.gov and runs them through Huron’s 424 module. Our most recent analysis was on 5/5/2022. The outcome of this analysis is posted on our client-facing website:
Per your request, we ran a report of all SF424 (system-to-system) submissions for a large public R1 university with over $700M in annual federal funding, for the period of May 2021-May 2022. In that time period, they prepared just over 5,900 SF424 packages within Huron. Here is a summary of the result of these submissions:
As a note: a status of “Federal Funding Agency Tracking Number Assigned” or “Received by Federal Funding Agency” indicates a successful submission package which was validated by grants.gov and forwarded to the agency for review. Status of “Valid for Submission” means the package was ready to submit but was never submitted.
Will researchers be able to submit tasks/requests from Outlook? Can email threads automatically be attached to the requests?
Huron does not support submission of tasks from MS Outlook. However, it does support the collection/capture of emails and automatically attach them in the system. Huron delivers a feature called “email catcher” in which a dedicated email address is monitored by the Huron system. When emails are sent to the system and include a reference to the request/project identifier, the system automatically logs the email (and any attachments) to that request.
Do you have a way to initiate the MTA, NDA, Subaward agreements in the system?
Yes, Agreements includes dedicated SmartForms for MTA (both inbound and outbound), Non-Disclosure and Subaward agreement types. Each of these agreement types can be routed to the appropriate office for review. Agreements can be initiated either by the central office or by the PI/their support staff.
Agreements can be created either from each user’s dashboard, or as part of the proposal/award record. In the latter case, the agreement becomes related to the proposal/award automatically.
Can the system provide a Current and pending support information based on what is in the system?
Yes, information on both pending and awarded projects, as well as effort commitment, is collected and report-able in the system.
What format of current and pending do you generate? Ex. - NSF
Huron utilizes Word merge templates to generate current and pending / other support documents based on data stored in the system. The example shown during demonstrations was of the NIH other support document, and the NSF version could also be included in your deployment of HRS.
Is there a place to house documentation on payment for reconciliation purposes?
While Huron is not a financial/accounting system, you could choose to use the deliverables or award documents functionality of the award module to attach payment documentation.
Comments were made about the S2S and Grants.gov, Fastlane being phased out and potentially not supported in the products. WVU has heard differently, and we would like clarification.
Many of HRS Grants clients today allow investigators to choose whether they want to submit via Fastlane or via S2S capabilities included with Huron Grants. Huron understands that NSF’s goal is to retire proposal submission via Fastlane by January 2023 and replace it with Research.gov / grants.gov as submission mechanisms, based on the following communication from NSF: https://www.research.gov/common/attachment/Desktop/PD_RGOV.pdf
How long does it take for the development environment to be created and ready to go?
HRS development environments are deployed rapidly using virtualization technology and supporting utilities which automate much of the process, and typically can be completed in less than a week. Huron ensures that all required environments are ready in order to meet project timelines. Huron provides the following services as part of environment setup:
- Installation of all software pre-requisites (e.g. Windows Server, SQL Server, ISS), as well as the HRS software
- Configuration of environment, store, and database backup routines
- Configuration of network access to the software
- Configuration of the hosted environment and software monitoring tools
- Configuration of standard system maintenance tasks
- Audit of security settings on the server as well as software
If clients desire their own domain (and not the huronresearchsuite domain), clients are responsible for providing the associated SSL certificate.
Can you provide an overview of the maturity of all modules you have proposed for WVU?
The Huron Research Suite is a very mature suite of solutions. Here are the approximate “age” of the solutions. For the table below, the following definitions apply:
- First General Availability: This is the first date on which Huron released the solution as a delivered module. On this date, clients were able to access this software. Note that solutions marked with an asterisk (*) were available from Click Commerce prior to 2010 (prior to the acquisition of the software by Huron).
- Most Recent Release: This is the date of the most current release of the solution.
When will the Agreement Module be released or when it was released, any planned enhancements and when?
As noted above, the Agreements module was first released in 2014. The first clients to go live with this module went into production in 2015. As with all our modules, we have an active product roadmap for Agreements. The next release of Agreements (version 10.5) is planned for November 2022. This release includes improvements to the ancillary review process; a new administrative changes action; updates to the signing workflow and state; and agreement tagging.
What enhancements are planned for COI and when?
The next release of Huron COI is planned for Q1 2023. This release is planned to contain the following improvements: improvements to disclosure profiles, pre-approval requests, and managing write-in entities for disclosers; support for automatically requiring training to be completed when a user is added to a new category, assigning users to categories settings, and importing and displaying additional external training dates