Cost Savings and Customer Service

ORISE delivers Cost Savings and Customer Service with Off-the-Shelf Software

The Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education’s (ORISE) Scientific Peer Review Program is no different than any other organization striving to do more with less in the current economy.

With smaller budgets and faster turnaround needed for proposal reviews, utilizing Web-based collaboration tools to share information is necessary.

Therefore, the ORISE team built a project tracking and management system with off-the-shelf products—an immediate cost and time-saver.

In a recent example involving the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE), ORISE conducted an annual merit review—a complete and objective examination of DOE funded projects in progress by independent reviewers, based on predetermined criteria, who are knowledgeable in the project field—that included more than 500 review projects and 300 reviewers from around the world.

Once identified and scheduled, the reviewers were assigned to a project based on their areas of expertise, per the customer’s request, but project categories were very specific and finding reviewers that matched the specific categories proved challenging, at best, for ORISE.

To make the scheduling and matching of reviewers to project categories much easier, ORISE established a SharePoint, Web-based collaboration environment.

As a result, ORISE was able to not only customize the site to meet customer requirements but also provided customers with access to the site where they could gather more details on the reviewers, approve them and track the projects themselves.

Using SharePoint, more than 3,400 reviewer assignments have been successfully made and approved electronically from locations around the world.