The Mississippi Research Alliance lead by the MSU EPSCoR office is seeking to use Piestar services called DPx and RFx knowledge management systems for collaborative data and project management, monitoring, and evaluation, including application and proposal reviews for MSU Grant #G00008775. The MRA team at MSU is responsible for soliciting and issuing subawards to multiple institutions, and these systems will help issue and track these awards. The systems will also help the project management team track milestone progress throughout the project lifecycle. This comprehensive data must be reported to NSF every year. NSF Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR), EPSCoR Collaborations for Optimizing Research Ecosystems (E-CORE), and EPSCoR Research Incubators for STEM Excellence (E-RISE) programs have strict and complex reporting requirements, necessitating the coordinated data collection of program outputs such as component personnel, publications, presentations, disaggregated data, and other outputs from distributed research teams at numerous institutions. Piestar systems are heavily customized to align with NSF policies, compliance, and reporting requirements and procedures. Using Piestar systems will greatly simplify the management of our program. No other software system is available with comparable features and capabilities. Piestar, Inc. is uniquely able to provide both software and experienced technical support services due to many years of experience working with projects funded by NIH, NIST, NSF, USAID, and USDA. Piestar systems were originally created in 2013 at Kansas State University. In 2014, Piestar, Inc. was formed to support and market the Piestar systems. Due to the historical relationship between Piestar, Inc. and NIH, NIST, NSF, USAID, and USDA research programs, Piestar systems are exclusively customized to meet the data collection, project management, monitoring, evaluation, proposal review, and reporting needs for our program. Please note: This is a Sole Source Notification.
