Stories

Colleagues,

I wanted to update you on our progress in implementing the Workday Student system.  Over 110 of our SCU colleagues have been working on the Workday Student implementation since July 2021.  Full implementation will occur in 2023, although a limited number of functional modules will come online in late 2022.  I think it’s useful to briefly review how we got to this point, our current status of the implementation, and our plans going forward.

Why are we replacing our existing Peoplesoft Student system?  And why did we pick Workday?

The short answer is that we couldn’t continue to use Peoplesoft, and our user community (faculty and staff) chose Workday to replace it.

SCU acquired the Peoplesoft ERP (Enterprise Resource Program) in the late 1990s.  The Peoplesoft ERP ran on a non-standard IBM database called DB2, and over the years, the original product was modified over 1,300 times.  Peoplesoft was acquired by Oracle in 2005.

By 2014, it was abundantly clear that Peoplesoft would not be able to meet our growing campus technology needs.  Peoplesoft represented antiquated, decades-old software design; was not user friendly; was very costly and difficult to support; was extremely difficult to upgrade, given the large number of modifications made to the original source code; had numerous, glaring security issues; and was not designed for the mobile environment.

The final impetus in making the decision to look for a new system to replace Peoplesoft was the March 2015 Oracle announcement that they would stop enhancing our on-premise Peoplesoft Student system in December 2023, and that they would be committing their resources to moving their products to the cloud.  This meant that if we stayed with our existing system, we would not get new functional enhancements, fixes, security alerts, critical patch updates, and new tax, legal, and regulatory updates. 

Consequently, in that same month (March 2015) a committee representing the major functional offices at the University (the Provost’s Office, Admissions, Financial Aid, Business Services, Human Resources, and Development) was created to evaluate potential systems to replace Peoplesoft.  By late Spring 2015, the committee had narrowed the list of potential replacement systems to Ellucian, Oracle, and Workday.  By spring 2016, the committee further narrowed the potential candidates to Oracle and Workday.

In May 2016, Information Services staged what is known as a “shootout”, and Oracle and Workday demonstrated their products to our SCU user community over a two-week period in a head-to-head competition.  There were general presentations (which were repeated several times), functional module presentations of the three major systems (Finance, HR, and Student), and open computer labs where our users could try the products.  Users were surveyed after every session.

At the conclusion of the two weeks, 303 users submitted survey responses, and Workday won 43 out of 45 voting categories.

Due to budget challenges, SCU was not able to acquire Workday until late 2017.  Implementation activities for the Workday HR module began in March 2018, and Workday HR went live in September 2019.  Implementation activities for the Workday Finance module began in January 2020, and Workday Finance went live in January 2021.

What’s the current status of the project and what’s next?

The Workday Student implementation has three phases: research/discovery and plan, which occurred from July 2021 through September 2021; architect and build (the phase we are in now), which started in October 2021 and will run through June 2022; and test and deploy, which will start in July 2022 and conclude in November 2023.  Workday Student will go live in five segments beginning in November 2022, and the final segment will go live in October 2023.  The segment that most of the user community will use will go live in March 2023.

SCU is using a company named Alchemy to help us implement Workday.

What other Universities use Workday Student?

26 universities and colleges are currently using Workday Student, including Wellesley, Simmons University, Brandeis University, Smith College and Hamline University.  Seven universities and colleges will go live with Workday Student in 2022.

What kind of training opportunities will be available?

There will be multiple training opportunities and modalities made available.  We will share more information as we get closer to the implementation date.

Where can I find more information?

We’ve created a website that we will update frequently; it is: https://www.scu.edu/technology/workday-student/

I’ll also be updating our user community regularly.

Closing thoughts

Five years ago, I wrote the following to you:

ERP implementations are massive, extremely complex multi-year projects.  This implementation will be a collaborative effort among many groups.  Even with the best staff, the best user community, the best planning, and the best implementation partner, things can – and will – go wrong (hopefully in our test environments where we can fix them before they get moved to production).  You have our commitment that we will make this transition as seamless and painless as possible.

There will be ups and down, but we will come out of this in a much better place than we started.  Ultimately, implementing Workday will allow us to provide more and better support to all of you; will provide our offices with better tools to do their jobs; and will provide a far friendlier user experience for our students, faculty, and staff.

Five years later, all of this is still true.

I close with this final thought and request.  My staff have been working on this Workday implementation for many years now, and are frankly very tired and a little burned out.  Many of our colleagues in our user community that will utilize and support Workday Student – the academic side of the house – are also tired and burned out.  Everyone still has their day jobs that they must do on top of Workday implementation activities that will unfold for at least another 19 months.  Especially given that we are a Jesuit institution, as we go forward, please, let us be kind to one another, and presume goodwill.

Thanks for your support – it means a lot to us.

Bob