UVA Research Launches Huron Grants and Agreements for Comprehensive Proposal, Award, and Agreement Lifecycle Management

As the complexity and risk of the research enterprise continue to grow, institutions are accelerating the adoption of technology to improve efficiency and effectiveness. When the University of Virginia (UVA), a Carnegie Tier-One Research (R1) institution, sought to upgrade its custom-built electronic research administration application, it selected Huron to implement the Huron Research Suite, a proven and comprehensive collection of software solutions tailor-made for managing the business of research.

In 2021, UVA received 2,207 awards for sponsored research, placing it among the nation’s most active research universities. With ResearchUVA, the legacy system the UVA Office of Sponsored Programs developed nearly a decade ago to manage research administration, showing signs of aging, it began a search for a partner to implement an enterprise research administration (ERA) solution that could keep pace with the volume of research conducted by the university.

After completing a review process involving stakeholders from across campus, UVA selected Huron to implement the Huron Research Suite, beginning with licensing the SaaS versions of the suite’s Grants and Agreements modules. According to the selection committee, Huron was chosen because “the Research Suite had the most intuitive user interface and a strong track record of successful deployments at peer institutions.” It also integrated well with Workday Human Capital Management and Workday Financial Management, which Brandeis implemented in 2020 and 2021, respectively.

Branding the Huron solution as ResearchUVA Powered by Huron (PBH), the UVA and Huron teams worked closely over the course of 13 months, beginning in the spring of 2021, to deploy Huron Grants and Agreements and created comprehensive analytics tools powered by a sponsored programs data warehouse built by Huron. Additional solutions and refinements to PBH continue to be made by UVA.

To learn more about this transformational project, download a case study from The Tambellini Group about the implementation and rollout, as well as lessons learned.