A global management consulting and professional services company had ambitions to become a top provider of research administration software and analytics for leading institutions across education, healthcare, non-profits, and federal research. Standing in the way was its legacy Human Research Suite (HRS), a set of applications supporting different research administration needs, which had grown heavily customized over time. That customization came at a real cost: each application upgrade took about 400 hours to complete due to complex configurations, and 28% of client charges were being directed toward these operations alone, raising overall costs across the board. Outdated technology and inconsistent features across the suite made upgrades genuinely difficult and required extensive customization just to meet client needs, an approach that couldn’t scale with the company’s ambitions.
Ascendion co-engineered 4 of the 12 applications in the HRS Suite (Animal Ops, IACUC, Safety, and IRB) and developed a SaaS product hosted on AWS, rebuilding HRS as a single, cloud-based, multi-tenant product built on the latest technologies.
Industry-standard features were introduced to reduce the need for future customizations, while application-specific microservices with Open APIs enabled seamless third-party integration, bringing response times down to 2 to 3 seconds. The entire product suite was refactored for cloud deployment to enable operational scalability, and Ascendion executed a dual-track strategy to protect and grow revenue, enhancing the current platform while simultaneously re-architecting it for the cloud. The research suite was also rebranded to align better with customer needs and emerging growth opportunities.
Tech Stack:
Impacted more than 600,000 researchers, handling a total of $47 billion, constituting half of the yearly federal research grants awarded through a modernized platform.
Enabled 183 research institutions to accelerate their research.
Delivered an 8% decrease in operational expenses.
Achieved a 3-second API response time.
Reached 100%+ on-time completion of sprints, with less than 2% defect density and a declining defect trend.
Ramped up 60+ resources in 2023, a roughly 90% increase from 2022.
