Solicitation: NIH-OLAO-OD5-NOI5719299
The National Institutes of Health intends to negotiate on a sole source basis with Rheaply Inc. for NEI to adopt a system to (i) improve efficiency, timeliness, and quality of services, (ii) improve coordination and information sharing across existing silos, (iii) reduce duplication of activities or functions across multiple parts of the organization, and (iv) develop processes to strategically use limited resources as smartly as possible.
The primary objective of this contract is to enable better business management of several categories of scientific assets within the NEI Division of Intramural Research (DIR). The selected data science solution will decrease inefficiencies and redundancie and increase resource sharing, leading to cost saving. Further objectives include:
- Complete and easy business management of NEI Core Facilities (for users and administrators) — accounting, internal billing, user scheduling, and all resulting data and insights will be available for NEI stakeholders to make better operational decisions with a fraction of the current time commitment;
- Reduction in total research-related procurement costs — over-buying or double-buying practices are eliminated when the NEI research community uses surplus inventory, whether consumables such as pricy antibodies or plastics or access to high-end scientific instrumentation; and
- More expedited and productive research programs — easy tracking and validation of research samples and reagents to increase transparency and eliminate errors.
The selected vendor was chosen because market research discovered no other vendor that provides all three of the primary required core functions in a single, integrated web-based solution. The core functions are: (1) asset management to be used by administrators, scientists, and other support staff; (2) scheduling, for reserving resources such as equipment and time slots in scientific core facilities; and (3) sample tracking in order to follow samples as they progress through workflow steps in a scientific core facility.
