The U. Grants project is a good example of how a well-conceived and constructed database system can make an office run much more smoothly. Before the U. Grants application was built, the Office of Research at The University of South Dakota used a system that was built with obsolete software. The old system didn't have an interface that today's computer users are accustomed to using, and it was unable to adapt to current and future needs. To make matters worse, some key reports took hours to manually construct. This was obviously a drain on productivity.

The U. Grants application helped change all of that. It's built with Microsoft Access, a software platform that today's users are familiar with. The application was also designed to allow new functionality to be added without a tremendous amount of work. The most important aspect of this application, however, may very well be the reports. Reports that were tedious and time-consuming to construct can be created almost instantly. This helps the entire office be more productive because it frees up a lot of time for other things.

If you're looking to see the finished application in action, you're out of luck. U. Grants is an internal application that does not interface with the outside world.