Building Industrial Engagement and Income: Digital Systems

Project overview

This Digital Systems project is part of the Building Industrial Engagement and Income Transformational Initiative and has two key objectives: 

• To implement the customer relationship management (CRM) tool Salesforce, within teams in Research, Innovation and Knowledge Exchange (RIKE) in order to streamline processes, improve communication, and build profitable relationships with external organisations and partners. 
• To replace the current training course management tool, Administrate, with a new solution which can support the University’s selected payment provider. 

Salesforce is the University’s chosen customer relationship management tool (CRM), its implementation within teams in RIKE, will replace current manual methods (Google Sheets, email inboxes) of tracking our communication with external partners.

This project will also create a CRM solution blueprint and standardised set of processes that will be extended to other areas in RIKE through the BIEI Transformation Initiative, once this project has completed.

Finally, the course management tool currently being used across the department will be replaced by another third party product that is compatible with the University’s preferred payment provider, WPM.

When?

Salesforce is due to be implemented within the teams in RIKE by Spring 2025. The replacement for our current training tool Administrate, will also be in place by Spring 2025.

Where?

This project will deliver Salesforce CRM to the following areas within RIKE: 

• Business Development Team 
• Research and Innovation Development Team (RID)
• Consultancy 
• Institute for Safe Autonomy

Why?

We currently use manual processes such as monitoring shared inboxes and completing Google spreadsheets to track our communication with external partners. This approach  limits our overall visibility of the external organisations we are working with at both  team and institutional level. By implementing Salesforce teams will more effectively capture, share and collaborate on information. Using Salesforce reporting functionality will also enable us to monitor our industrial engagement and identify opportunities for improvement.

Our replacement training course tool will be implemented with the University’s payment provider, removing the need for manual re-keying of information between two systems.

Benefits

Benefits of this project include:

• more efficient processes will reduce administrative overheads, enabling staff to devote their time to higher value activities.
• slicker processes will improve how we interact with our current and future external partners, which in turn will result in more profitable relationships.
• closer collaboration and sharing of information between internal teams.
• a new standard for how external partnerships are managed at the University
• negate the need to manually input information into our course training tool and the University’s payment provider system