Electronic research administration system implementation updates issued by Office of the Vice President for Research and Economic Development

The Office of the Vice President for Research and Economic Development recently announced the procurement of the Huron Research Suite to support and facilitate the research administration and compliance processes at Auburn University.

Since then, the office has executed the scope of work for the conflict of interest and IRB modules with starting dates of June 15 and July 1, 2023, respectively. The office anticipates a “go-live” date for these two modules in early spring semester of 2024. The grants and agreements module (including proposal submissions) will begin onboarding in the fall with implementation for IACUC, animal operations and biosafety modules starting next summer.

Implementation of each module includes:

• Onboarding – in-depth administrator training on the system, gap analysis, establishment of milestones and deadlines, updating procedures and workflow

• Integration – preparing mock-ups and protoypes, defining security requirements, roles and responsibilities, finalizing the testing and training plans

• Testing – trying to “break the system” to address any problems before going live

• Deployment – migrating to a production environment – i.e. “go live”

• Support – troubleshooting and closing out the implementation of the module.

The onboarding and process analysis team at Auburn has begun data and process clean-up, while Huron has assigned a team to work with the Auburn team. The team is working on its communication plan and preparing for stakeholder focus group meetings.

The IRB module team at Huron has been assigned, and the conflict of interest module team is being created. The ERA website will continue to provide project updates as the system implementation process moves forward.

(Written by Martha Taylor)