New Software Module Primary Research Manager(TM) Now Available from Northern Light

Workflow automation features facilitate management of primary research projects within SinglePoint(TM) strategic research portals

BOSTON, July 15, 2013 /PRNewswire/ — Northern Light (www.northernlight.com) today introduced Primary Research Manager™, a software application embedded within SinglePoint™ Strategic Research Portals that facilitates management of primary market research projects. By adding a project management tool within the same portal environment in which all of an enterprise's research is indexed and accessed, research managers can more effectively provision, track, and control primary research projects.  Benefits include a reduction in the overhead associated with performing primary research projects, more timely publication of the research performed, and more complete collections of research in the SinglePoint research portal.

With the Northern Light Primary Research Manager module, client staff can create projects with custom metadata; associate research documents with the projects throughout the project life cycle; control publication to appropriate groups; and manage milestones with research vendors.  In addition, workflow steps can be implemented such as moving the document to the next step in the workflow, approving documents for publication, or payment of research vendors.  Using Northern Light MI Analyst™, concept categories can be created to enable automated text analysis of key project metadata such as brands, research document types, and the type of research performed.

The module's workflow features include automatically provisioning projects from an organization's accounting and purchasing systems, and generating alerts when documents are not available in the market research portal on the project milestone due dates. These capabilities reduce lag time and administrative overhead on projects. Also, to further streamline workflow, external research vendors working on a project can be given secure access to the system to upload documents directly to the research portal.

"Northern Light SinglePoint customers are research-driven companies. When you're spending millions of dollars annually conducting primary research that will drive critically important decisions, speeding these projects to completion and giving the research staff the ability to manage more of them is an organizational imperative," Northern Light CEO C. David Seuss said. "Having a research project management tool that works within the established framework of their enterprise research portal – the place where the organization's research assets live and its research professionals routinely spend their time – makes all the sense in the world."

Primary Research Manager is available immediately to Northern Light SinglePoint clients.

About Northern Light
Northern Light has been providing strategic research portals, business research content, and search technology to global enterprises since 1996.  Northern Light's current clients include Fortune 100 market leaders in information technology, pharmaceuticals, telecommunications, energy, financial services, transportation, retailing, and consumer products. Headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts, Northern Light has unique partnerships with more than 100 of the world's leading syndicated technology and industry research publishers, and is a charter member of the Center for Complex Systems and Enterprises at the Stevens Institute of Technology.