Marine Bioproducts CRC brings together more than 80 partners from industry, research and government to [one line on the CRC's mission, e.g. build Australia's position as a leader in marine bioproducts and biorefining.]. Like every Cooperative Research Centre, it must manage a portfolio of projects, partner cash and in-kind commitments, and regular reporting against Commonwealth milestones.

The CRC's first attempt at a research management system did not succeed. [One or two sentences on why, e.g. the application did not fit the way the CRC works, was not adopted by project leaders, or could not deliver reliable reporting. Keep this factual and fair to the previous vendor.] With the system unable to do the job, the CRC fell back on spreadsheets.

Spreadsheets kept the CRC moving, but at a cost:

• Project and partner information lived in multiple files, held by different people.
• Quarterly reporting meant manually moving data between Word and Excel, with each hand-off adding the risk of transcription error.
• Project leaders had no consistent place to see project data or submit progress reports, and the central team spent its time chasing, collating and reconciling instead of supporting the research.
• Years of legacy project, partner and contribution data sat in formats that could not easily be reused.

For a Centre accountable to the Commonwealth and its partners, that kind of reporting is slow, resource-intensive and heavily dependent on a few key people.

[Pull-quote from MBCRC on the pain of the manual process, e.g. time spent collating quarterly reports.] [Name, title], Marine Bioproducts CRC.

The implementation had four parts.

1. Legacy data, made ready. Rather than starting with an empty system, the Foveal team worked with MBCRC to bring its history across. Data from the earlier system attempt and from the CRC's spreadsheets was cleansed, mapped and loaded into turnKeyRM: 220 projects with start dates running from 2021 to 2027, more than 80 partner organisations, 1,626 partner funding commitments and 1,050 project fund allocations, against a signed partner cash commitment of $70M. Commonwealth Agreement reporting history spans ten financial years, FY2021/22 to FY2030/31. The result was a complete, consistent record that project leaders could rely on from day one, with no need to re-enter what the CRC already knew.

2. A branded partner portal. Built on Salesforce Experience Cloud and styled in MBCRC's own branding, the MBCRC Portal gives project leaders a secure, self-service front door to the CRC. Each user signs in to see their own projects and information: the quarter's progress report and how long the reporting window has left, quarterly milestone progress, cash and in-kind position, Commonwealth milestone contributions, dissemination and IP records, project files, and the CRC's templates and guides. They see this without waiting on the central team for a snapshot. Because the portal draws on turnKeyRM, everyone sees the same governed data, presented consistently.

3. Progress reporting online. With clean data in place, project leaders can now complete their progress reports online, directly in turnKeyRM and through the portal. Instead of emailing documents and spreadsheets back and forth, each leader works in one governed system, against their own projects, on a consistent cadence. Each quarter a report is opened against the project, defaulting to the current financial year and quarter. The project leader signs in and works through it in tabs: status and RAG rating, quarterly notes, the quarter's financial summary of cash and in-kind actuals, and progress against each milestone. Files are uploaded once and cascade to the project and, where relevant, to specific milestones. A completion checklist covering dissemination, milestones, IP and in-kind shows exactly what is outstanding, and the submit action stays hidden until the report can genuinely go. On submission the report locks, so what the approver reviews is fixed.

4. Key automations. turnKeyRM replaced the manual steps in the reporting process with automated workflows, including:

   1. Automatic reminders. Project leaders are reminded before each report is due (the 7th of the month after quarter end): two weeks before, two days before, on the day, and five days after if it is still outstanding. Anyone who has already submitted is skipped, so no one gets a nudge they don’t need.

   2. Built-in review and approval. A report can only be submitted once its checklist is complete. It then locks and the approver is notified. Approval closes the report and lets the project leader know, while a request for changes reopens it with the reason attached. Finance sees approved payments for the quarter at a glance, with no extra email required.

   3. Project updates that roll up on their own. Progress notes and achievements from project reports are combined automatically into one summary for each Commonwealth Agreement milestone. The milestone’s traffic light reflects its weakest contributing project, so problems surface early. These summaries then flow into the quarterly and annual Commonwealth reports. If the CRC edits a suggested status or comment by hand, the system respects that change and leaves it alone.

   4. In-kind and staff time valued automatically. In-kind records are set up for every partner commitment across a project’s life, split into staff and non-staff contributions. When staff time is entered during quarterly reporting, it is converted to a dollar value using the salary already recorded for that commitment. Cash and in-kind totals then roll up to show each project’s and each partner’s overall position.

Because quarterly reporting now draws directly from the same governed data, the numbers are no longer copied by hand between documents. What the leadership team reviews is what the project leaders submitted.

Operationally, a highly manual process, assembled by hand across spreadsheets and documents, is now an online one with key automations. Reporting that once depended on chasing and collating is delivered on a predictable cadence, the risk of transcription error that comes with moving data between files is reduced, and the central team can spend its time on the research mission rather than data wrangling. [Add measurable results if available: e.g. hours saved per reporting cycle, reduction in follow-ups, on-time submission rate.]

The branded portal changes how the CRC is experienced from the outside. Project leaders now sign in to the MBCRC-branded environment to see their own information and complete their reporting, rather than relying on emailed files and requests to the central team. Twenty-eight project leaders have portal accounts, and the first quarterly round run in the system, Q1 FY2026/27, carried 36 progress reports across the active reporting portfolio.

Strategically, the CRC now has a trusted, complete record of its portfolio, including the legacy history that was once locked in spreadsheets. That gives management, the Board and partners a firmer foundation for decisions, and positions the CRC to build further on its data, with reporting dashboards already live across quarterly submission status, project RAG ratings and the partner funds position, and AI-assisted reporting demonstrated to the MBCRC team.

The journey also matters. After a system that did not work and a stopgap that could not scale, Marine Bioproducts CRC now has a platform built by people who know how Cooperative Research Centres operate, and that was shaped around the way MBCRC actually works.

[Closing quote from MBCRC on the outcome and the experience of working with Foveal.] [Name, title], Marine Bioproducts CRC.

For a collaboration that depends on many partners and project leaders working toward a shared goal, reliable, timely reporting is more than a convenience. It builds the confidence and accountability that hold the partnership together.