The Challenge

The Louisiana Community and Technical College System (LCTCS) manages all 13 public two-year institutions in the State of Louisiana. To fund the operations and program-specific elements of these institutions, LCTCS manages grant programs, including the Adult Education and the Perkins Technical and Vocational programs.

For years, LCTCS’s grants processes had been largely manual, which led to a number of operational and management challenges. Just reviewing a grants application, for example, took four to five hours, and, because the application review was manually recorded, many of the records did not reconcile at the time of year-end audit. Ultimately, the paper-based system was inconsistent across the organization, far from cost-efficient, and prone to error at every turn.

REI Solution

GovGrants® is REI Systems’ grants management solution built on Salesforce. By using Salesforce as a platform, GovGrants was able to provide LCTCS with improved grant performance in a matter of months. GovGrants is a comprehensive grants management solution that supports all stages of the grants management lifecycle—from creation and publication of funding opportunities, application intake, and application review, to grant creation and post-grant activities.

During the development process, REI tailored GovGrants to meet LCTCS’ needs. GovGrants increases workflow automation integrates with LCTCS’ financial system and includes automated state and Federal reporting — all in one place. Furthermore, all elements of the grant process can be included in ad-hoc reports, increasing the ease of reporting, tracking of grant funds, and the ability for grants managers to take timely corrective actions. Since adopting GovGrants, LCTCS’ manual data entry and errors have been substantially reduced. And, even after deployment, REI’s experts continue to support LCTCS promptly and efficiently to meet their needs.

Impact

In January 2017, LCTCS spoke about its success with GovGrants during a webinar titled “Drive Better Mission Outcomes: The Next Generation of Grants Management Solutions.” LCTCS reported that, since using GovGrants, the organization’s manual data entry and errors have been reduced, and application review time has been cut by more than half.

Gerald Paul Mayeaux, associate director of fiscal affairs at LCTCS, praised GovGrants for simplifying and improving grants management processes as both a grantor and grantee. “This just goes above and beyond because it pulls everything into one place,” Mayeaux said. “We wouldn’t be able to do what we’re doing now without this system.”