The digital backbone of a university's research office: proposals, grants, incentives, approvals and compliance on one platform.
A large, multi-campus private university in India asked us to replace the email threads, spreadsheets and paper forms its Research & Development office relied on.
We designed and built a full-stack research management portal that covers the complete research lifecycle, from a faculty member's first sign-up to the final payment of an incentive. It serves faculty, Ph.D. scholars, evaluators, department heads, principals, deans, research-office staff and administrators.
Our role: architecture, design, development, deployment and ongoing support. The platform has been in production since July 2025 and continues to evolve.
The office needed one secure system every faculty member could use without training, one that encoded the university's rules instead of relying on people to remember them.
Claims for papers, patents, books, conferences, memberships and awards were passed by hand through several approval levels, with no visibility for faculty.
Incentive amounts depended on journal quartile, author position, co-author count, affiliation and more, so manual calculation was slow and inconsistent.
Proposals, evaluation meetings, committee scoring, grant sanction and fund utilisation were tracked across separate files.
The same paper could be claimed by several co-authors, or twice under different categories, and it was hard to catch.
Nothing reminded approvers when an application had been waiting in their queue for days.
Different faculties, institutes and departments all needed the same system, with access scoped to each person's role.
55+ functional modules that cover every workflow the research office runs.
Research papers, patents, books and chapters, event participation, memberships, publication-charge reimbursement, awards and externally funded project sanctions.
Paper details are fetched from Scopus, Web of Science and Crossref, so faculty rarely type metadata by hand.
A policy engine calculates the tentative incentive as the form is filled in, and shows its working to the claimant and every approver.
Each internal co-author gets a Co-Author Claims inbox to claim their own share from the same record.
Drafts, editing before first approval, status filters, Excel export and a formal discrepancy process for disputed amounts.
Up to four stages per claim type, with comments, amount adjustments, hold and reject paths, and a special-intervention escalation route.
Quartiles, author positions, co-author splits, editor multipliers, per-year caps and eligibility checks live in one rules layer. A policy revision is a change in one place.
DOIs, normalised titles and text similarity are compared across all claimants to flag the same work claimed twice, by one person or by several.
A Gemini model checks uploaded proofs against Crossref metadata for affiliation, authorship and indexing, and stores a confidence score with its reasoning.
Nine Cloud Scheduler jobs send evaluation reminders, meeting alerts, weekly digests and 48-hour approver nudges. Each can be paused, tested or run on demand.
Domain-restricted sign-in, server-enforced role checks and security rules. A dependency audit took the project from 89 reported vulnerabilities to zero.
Campus, faculty, institute and department form a configurable hierarchy, so adding a campus is a configuration change, not a code change.
The portal is now the system of record for the university's research office.
We design and build custom workflow platforms, portals and internal tools for institutions and growing organisations, from first conversation to production and beyond.
Start a Conversation