A Centralized Solution for Research Grant Management and Documentation

Streamlining Operations and Enhancing Efficiency with Fibi at KKI

A Centralized Solution for Research Grant Management and Documentation

Manual grant management processes prove to be inefficient and time-consuming.

KKI utilized a decentralized research management approach with grants staff located in different departments on multiple campuses throughout the region. In this siloed structure, grant personnel drafted and stored their grant documents in their individual electronic and paper files, which made accessing grant information dependent upon that individual.

Also, emails were the form of communication used by researchers, grant writers, and staff for sharing proposal changes and updates. This increased the risk of multiple versions of the same documents being reviewed resulting in the opportunity for the incorrect documents being submitted to the funding agency.

Furthermore, routing grants involved physically walking grant packets from various locations to the administration office for review and approval. This type of routing and review process required onsite presence by everyone in the workflow.

Finally, because of the decentralized model, creating reports on grant success rates required the collection of data from multiple departments. This was an arduous task for the grants staff, requiring them to pull their data and forward it to the administration office who in turn were tasked with collating and organizing the multiple spreadsheets before calculations could be applied and the report completed.

Recognizing the need for an electronic-based grant management system.

With the goals of

having a paperless grant submission routing and review process
reducing the administrative burden of always having ‘all hands on deck’
discontinuing the use of spreadsheets as the sole source for reports, and
utilizing a central repository of all pre- and post-award grant-related data and documents, KKI began its search for a robust grants management system.

After reviewing several ERAs, KKI enthusiastically chose Polus Solutions to guide them through the planning and implementation phases of Fibi.

As a bonus, because of their vast experience with digital conversion, Polus was able to advise KKI on how using Fibi would streamline their processes and provide greater efficiencies while eliminating those time-consuming activities that added no value.

One system centralizes KKI’s operations.

With Fibi, KKI now has a central repository that records the details and houses the documents of every research grant.

Fibi’s Proposal module provides KKI the ability to

plan coverage during peak submission deadlines and reassign tasks as needed,
create a different review workflow for each division,
communicate completely within Fibi with questions and updates, and
give access to users within the department, the finance office, the research administration, and the executive staff.

This has reduced redundancy across the Institute and decreased the risk of multiple versions of the application floating around in everyone’s emails, and at any given time, all stakeholders can see the status of their proposal.

Eliminating the use of spreadsheets to track KKI’s awarded projects, the fields within the Awards module captures all of the data needed to confidently run reports with any number of parameters, such as dates, number of funded projects, total awarded dollars by researcher and/or division, animal-based and/or human-related funded projects, just to name a few.

However, one of the greatest benefits that Fibi has provided to KKI is the ability to see the life cycle of each grant because of its internal linking of all post-award activities to the initial proposal.

What began as a system specific to research activities, is now the home of all of the Institute’s sponsored projects, including early childhood development and community programs, causing harmonization throughout the Institute with one central standard of operation for proposals and awards.

Today, Kennedy Krieger Institute is actively working on the implementation of the Agreements module and is in discussion with Polus for additional modules in Fibi.

Since embarking on this journey with Polus and the transition from our manual processes to Fibi, we have noted improvements in our internal routing and review process, including the timeliness of approvals, and have a better idea of the volume of submissions, which has allowed us to balance the workloads of our team. The truest testament, however, to Fibi’s strength as a grant management system, was proven when the world shut down because of the pandemic and how easily our grant-related activities transitioned from onsite to remote from home without any pause in our ability to support our researchers or their submissions.

Since embarking on this journey with Polus and the transition from our manual processes to Fibi, we have noted improvements in our internal routing and review process, including the timeliness of approvals, and have a better idea of the volume of submissions, which has allowed us to balance the workloads of our team. The truest testament, however, to Fibi’s strength as a grant management system, was proven when the world shut down because of the pandemic and how easily our grant-related activities transitioned from onsite to remote from home without any pause in our ability to support our researchers or their submissions.

- Jacqueline Pittman

Administrator, Sponsored Projects

See Fibi in Action

Get a personalized demo and explore how Fibi best fits your research administration needs

Streamlining Operations and Enhancing Efficiency with Fibi at KKI