At North Carolina State University, the Office of Research Commercialization manages a $630M research portfolio, commercializing innovations through patents, licenses, and IP agreements. Nicholas LeBlanc, Assistant Director of Operations & Finance, serves on the leadership team of a 21-person department and directly supervises six staff. His work includes protecting federal and industry-funded intellectual property, ensuring regulatory compliance, and managing multimillion-dollar revenue streams.
His office oversees everything from invention disclosures and license negotiations to federal Bayh-Dole compliance and annual reporting. The stakes are high. If his department misses a deadline or detail, the university risks losing IP rights or federal funding.
Key stats inside the case study:
- $200,000 in revenue recovered from missed industry IP fees due to improved visibility
- 3–4× faster federal utilization reporting (400+ reports/year)
- $10M in revenue managed annually with just 22 staff
- 20+ year license agreements now managed with accurate royalty & milestone tracking
The Challenge: Compliance & Revenue at Risk
Before Process Street, the team juggled compliance using PDF checklists, Word docs, SOPs, Google Drive folders, and database tools, none of which connected or scaled. Processes lived in people’s heads, not systems. Staff turnover threatened to derail workflows, and catching critical errors, like missed fee collections, was nearly impossible.
Key pain points included:
- No visibility into process status or ownership
Managers had no way to quickly see where a process stood or who was responsible for each step. If a task stalled, it wasn’t clear why or where. This lack of oversight made it difficult to identify bottlenecks or hold staff accountable, especially across dozens of concurrent workflows. - Difficult to assign, update, or manage tasks
With no centralized task management, responsibilities were often buried in email threads or siloed documents. There was no streamlined way to hand off work between staff, and version control issues created confusion and duplication. - Compliance steps were missed due to manual oversight
Federal regulations like the Bayh-Dole Act require strict adherence to deadlines and reporting standards. But when tasks lived in static documents or people’s heads, critical compliance actions were occasionally skipped, risking IP rights and federal funding. - Long, manual cycles for federal utilization reports (400+ annually)
These reports demand deep financial analysis and precision. Without automation or process guidance, the team spent months digging through data, chasing down queries, and revisiting SOPs just to complete a single round, resulting in frequent delays and mounting stress.
Why did you choose Process Street above its competitors?
“We looked at several tools but Process Street stood out for its interface and flexibility. It was clean, intuitive, and far more streamlined than the alternatives. The conditional logic was a game-changer for us; our processes are complex and logic-heavy, and Process Street could actually handle that without forcing us to bend our workflows to fit the software…
We’ve had people leave the office and take entire processes with them. Process Street changed that. It captures the knowledge, enforces consistency, and makes us far less vulnerable to turnover.”
![](https://www.process.st/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/nicholas-leblanc-nc-state.png")
Assistant Director of Operations & Finance
NC State University, Office of Technology Licensing
The Solution: Process Street Brings Structure, Control & Accountability
With Process Street, Nicholas built structured workflows across licensing, finance, and compliance:
- Bayh-Dole Compliance: Ensures federally funded IP disclosures meet agency-specific requirements using conditional logic.
- License Agreement Handoff: Collects key licensing terms to set up long-term agreements accurately in their central database.
- Annual Utilization Reporting: Streamlines 400+ annual federal reports by linking steps to pre-built database queries.
- Pre-License Compliance Check: Verifies all financial and legal risks are addressed before signing a license, with auto-generated Google Docs.
- Federal Funding Review: Audits incoming grants to flag compliance obligations tied to industry or federal sponsors.
- Agreement Quality Control: Standardizes the final review of disclosures and contracts before formal entry into the system.
How did Process Street save your department $200k?
“One of my team members was working through his process and noticed that several inventions funded by industry weren’t being billed correctly. It turned out that we weren’t notified by another department that there was a fee attached, so those agreements slipped through the cracks. Thanks to the visibility Process Street gives us, we caught it—and recovered about $200,000 in missed revenue. Without that level of transparency, we would’ve never known.”
Assistant Director of Operations & Finance
NC State University, Office of Technology Licensing
The Results: $200K in Revenue Recovered
With Process Street, NC State’s Office of Technology Licensing recovered $200,000 in missed industry IP fees by identifying a billing gap that previously went unnoticed. The team now completes over 400 federally required utilization reports at 3–4× the speed, and manages $10 million in annual revenue with just 22 staff. Long-term license agreements, some spanning 20+ years, are accurately tracked for royalty payments and commercialization milestones.
How does Process Street help NC State?
“Process Street doesn’t force us to change how we work—it adapts to what we need. That means we can keep improving and refining, without ever feeling boxed in by the tool.”
Assistant Director of Operations & Finance
NC State University, Office of Technology Licensing
Process Street’s required fields ensure 100% task completion, eliminating skipped steps or missed data. And because every workflow is clearly documented and assigned, the office is now resilient to turnover, with critical knowledge retained. Integrated automations using Google Docs and Zapier have also cut out manual document creation and reduced administrative overhead.
Compliance isn’t optional. Neither is getting it wrong.
Miss a federal deadline, and your university could lose IP rights or millions in funding. That’s the pressure NC State faced. Process Street gave them the structure to stay audit-ready, error-free, and compliant at scale.
Note: Our solution is powered by AWS and uses these AWS services: Lambda, SQS, API Gateway, S3, CloudFront, Elastic Beanstalk, WAF, ELB, RDS Multi-AZ, EC2 and ElastiCache for Redis.
The post How NC State’s Tech Transfer Office Cut Compliance Risk & Recovered $200K first appeared on Process Street | Compliance Operations Platform.
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