Towards digitalization: grant management system adoption

Abstract

To monitor the entire grant's lifecycle, including the requirement to meet the deadline, provide accurate details and financial transparency, organizations have to focus and concentrate on making their funding work and eliminate the financial risk of not meeting all project, reporting, and reporting reimbursement deadlines. However, some organizations felt this process are not very critical including MCMC. Thus they have always been overlooked and underappreciated. Therefore, this research has identified the criticality to improve MCMC's grant management processes, particularly the grant application, evaluation, and reporting process. It highlighted that excel software had been actively used to develop data storage, processing, management, preservation, and retrieval. Manual paper, on the other hand, is a solution for proposal and document submission. These issues have arisen in the current process that led to inefficiencies that impacted the staff productivity. Therefore, there is a need to modify MCMC's grant management processes, especially in the Grant application, Evaluation, and Reporting process. To achieve it, three research objectives were developed and a mixed-method approach has been employed to measure the achievement of the research objectives where both quantitative and qualitative research design was done in sequence, respectively. Meanwhile, a Rapid Application Development approach has been used as a methodology for the system development of a prototype grant management system (application, evaluation, and report submission). In line with the MCMC's key initiatives to improve Malaysia's digitalization and connectivity, the researcher proposes a solution, which also serves as the main objective of this research, by creating a User Requirement Specification for the development of a grant management system. This allows for a more systematic grant management system and introduces more efficient ways to offer grant management services. The proposed system was demonstrated through the development of a prototype, which was then used to gauge staff perceptions of its adoption via a user survey. As a result, the prototype was developed successfully and met the user's requirements and specifications. Additionally, the vast majority (94%) of respondents stated that the system will aid in enhancing and improving employee efficiency and productivity. This suggests that they believed in the system's ability to improve the overall grant management process. That is, waste will be eliminated, time and effort will be saved, and operations will be streamlined in accordance with lean principles. In summary, it will boost productivity, promote safety, cut costs, and simplify scheduling. Thus, future research is recommended to focus on the development of a fully working system based on the prototype proposed.