Higher education is big business, and colleges and universities are turning to big business applications to help them compete.
The use of cloud in education—particularly applications for finance, human resources, planning, and student management and engagement—enables institutions to increase productivity, improve efficiency, and glean new insights about students, employees, and overall operations.
“Education is evolving, and the technology that drives our organization forward needs to reflect modern education best practices,” said Becky King, Associate Vice President of IT at Baylor University.
Why Oracle Cloud in Education?
Baylor, a 16,000-student university in Waco, Texas selected Oracle Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Cloud, Oracle Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) Cloud, and Oracle Human Capital Management (HCM) Cloud to replace many of its manual systems and processes. By moving its core finance, HR, and planning systems to one cloud platform, Baylor will be able to operate with more efficiency and agility.
Improved performance needs and increased efficiency also drove the University of Pittsburgh’s decision to roll out Oracle ERP Cloud and Oracle HCM Cloud.
“With Oracle ERP Cloud, we’ll be able to manage finance, HR, and student data on the same platform, creating a single source of truth that improves efficiency and organizational insights,” said Monte Cotto, Associate Vice Chancellor of Information Systems at the university.
The University of Pittsburgh chose Oracle Cloud when it needed to replace its legacy financial management system. The University of California San Diego faced the same inflection point. Its existing financial management system had grown complex and expensive to update, and the university chose Oracle ERP Cloud to replace it following a nine-month competitive bid process.
“Making sense of the data in our heavily customized legacy ERP system was creating headaches for our finance team and required significant levels of technical support,” said William McCarroll, Senior Director of Business and Financial Services General Accounting at UC San Diego. “It wasn’t sustainable long term and was holding us back.”
Oracle ERP Cloud enables the 36,000-student university to move from batch data processing overnight and during weekends to real-time business insights that can significantly speed up the finance team’s month- and year-end closing.
Oracle’s offerings for cloud in education also include software and services to help colleges and universities better recruit, engage with, and assist students. Westchester Community College in Valhalla, New York is implementing Oracle Student Cloud to keep pace with ever-evolving workforce requirements and student expectations.
“We are committed to student success, academic excellence, and workforce and economic development,” said Dr. Belinda Miles, President of Westchester Community College. “To deliver on those promises, we needed to leverage the best technology to modernize our operations and how we engage with our students.”
