Solutions turnKeyRM

Clarity from planning to impact.

turnKeyRM is a Research Information Management System (RIMS), built natively on Salesforce for Australian research organisations. It holds the people, money, projects, obligations and outputs of your research portfolio in one connected record, so the question “where are we with this project?” has one answer.

What turnKeyRM does

What turnKeyRM does

turnKeyRM is a system of record for research operations. Every project is a single record that carries its partners and people, its funding and agreements, its milestones and approvals, and the outputs it produces. Change any one of them and the others see it.

Pre-Award and Post-Award are not separate systems in turnKeyRM. A proposal and the agreement it becomes are the same project record at different stages, so nothing is re-keyed when a grant is won.

Every project, person, organisation and output can carry a persistent identifier (ORCID, ROR, RAiD, DOI or IGSN), so what is in the system can be checked against the source that issued it.

turnKeyRM ships with over 160 automations, built in Salesforce Flow and Apex, so the platform does the routine work from day one. Records are created, linked and automatically updated as projects move through their lifecycle, which means less manual data entry and fewer gaps between systems. The same automations enforce data governance: required fields are populated, relationships are validated, and inconsistencies are flagged before they become reporting problems. Because they are built on standard Salesforce tooling, they can be reviewed, extended or adjusted by your own administrators rather than depending on a vendor.

Foveal Lifecycle: Plan, Fund, Assure, Conduct, Disseminate

Core functional areas

Core functional areas

Five connected modules cover research operations end to end. Each one is a set of Salesforce objects, automations and reports that is already built and is configured, not coded, to fit your organisation.

1. Stakeholders

Research runs on relationships between people and organisations that persist across many projects and many years. turnKeyRM keeps them in one place: researchers, partner organisations, funders, participants and their roles on each project.

  • Researchers, partners, participants and funders as shared records, not per-project copies
  • Roles and institutional relationships across the portfolio
  • Engagement history and communications against each contact and organisation
  • Partner contributions and obligations visible from the organisation’s own record

People carry an ORCID iD and organisations a ROR ID, so a name in turnKeyRM resolves to a verified identity.

2. Finance

Research money arrives from several sources, on several timelines, with reporting obligations attached to each. turnKeyRM models the funding structure as it actually is, rather than flattening it into a single budget line.

  • Multi-partner funding structures and cash and in-kind contributions
  • Multi-year project budgets, allocated across organisations and workstreams
  • Payments, invoices and reconciliation against agreements
  • Reporting cycles that follow the funding agreement: annual, six-monthly or quarterly

Grants carry their funder’s DOI where one is issued, so the acknowledgement on an output points at a real grant record.

3. Projects

A project in turnKeyRM is a single record that moves through defined stages from opportunity to closure, with its agreements, team, budget and outputs attached. Proposals and agreements are stored as projects, so Pre-Award and Post-Award are stages of one record, not two systems.

  • Stage-based lifecycle tracking: opportunity, proposal, active, completed
  • Milestones, deliverables and dependencies
  • Investigators and partner organisations as they change over the life of the project
  • Classification against ANZSRC codes (Fields of Research, Socio-Economic Objective and Type of Activity) for reporting to funders and government
  • Real-time status across the portfolio

Each project is minted a RAiD, the national identifier for research activities, so the project and everything attached to it can be referenced outside turnKeyRM.

4. Governance

Ethics, risk, compliance and obligations are tracked against the project they belong to, not in a separate register. That makes them visible to the people running the project and auditable by the people assuring it.

  • Ethics approvals and their conditions
  • Risk identification, rating and treatment
  • Contractual and reporting obligations with due dates
  • Incident tracking and resolution

This ensures governance is visible, auditable and embedded in day-to-day operations.

Because people, organisations and projects carry verified identifiers, integrity checks rest on records that can be confirmed, not on free text taken on trust.

5. Outputs & impact

Outputs are the point of the exercise. turnKeyRM records what each project produced, where it went and what it led to, and links each output back to the people, organisations and funding behind it.

  • Publications, datasets, software, reports and other outputs against the project
  • Dissemination activities and impact evidence
  • Intellectual property as it is created: ownership, contributors, obligations and status
  • Commercialisation pathway and licensing where it applies

Outputs carry a DOI and physical samples an IGSN, so a reported output resolves to the thing itself.

Our Solutions

Persistent Identifiers

Sharper records. turnKeyRM carries the five national priority PIDs, ORCID, ROR, RAiD, DOI and IGSN, so people, organisations, projects and outputs resolve to something you can check.

Learn more

AI

Your research data, working for you. Connect Claude to turnKeyRM and ask questions, catch exceptions, keep records clean, log activity automatically and build the screens you need, without a development project.

Learn more

AXIS lifecycle maps

A practical mapping workshop that turns complex operations into a clear, shared lifecycle view, surfacing handoffs, bottlenecks and system requirements.

Learn more

News

Insights that match our
knowledge.

Unlocking RAiD: turnKeyRM is the first CRIS to make it native

As PIDs move towards a condition of funding, RAiD is the identifier that ties them together, and it now lives in your project record.

November 2026

Learn more

Why Persistent Identifiers Are the Next Layer on Top of Clean Research Data

Getting your own house in order with a single source of truth for projects, researchers, and outputs is the dream for many research centres.

August 2026

Learn more

Headless: No Head, All Brain

If you manage research projects, you don't just live in a research management system like turnKeyRM.

Headless is the name for closing that gap.

August 2026

Learn more

turnKeyRM named an iAwards finalist

A milestone for a platform that has supported Australia’s research sector for a decade, now adopted by 23 CRCs and recognised in the Not-for-Profit & Community category at the iAwards Queensland.

June 2026

Learn more

Let's bring
things into focus.

See turnKeyRM with your own portfolio

Book a Demo