Why Workday?

The Selection Process for OSU's Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) System

The expectations and demands on higher education are evolving: Faculty, staff and students have come to expect real-time, seamless online communication and engagement across various platforms and delivered in ways that feel relevant, contemporary and personalized. They want the ability and flexibility to choose how they engage with OSU — whether remote, in-person or hybrid — and for those capabilities to evolve along with their changing needs. They want an educational experience that is both brick and pixel and with a higher expectation for interactions with the university that are equitable, inclusive, accessible and welcoming to all.

The model for delivering high quality learning experiences is changing and we anticipate a competitive environment and demand for more personalized choices from students in higher education as the world continues to react to the changes ushered in by the pandemic. Amid national and state declines in in-person enrollment, OSU continues to see increasing enrollment levels in Ecampus, which is now the main contributor to our enrollment, revenue growth and tuition revenue.  

Our current digital ecosystem is more than 30 years old and is increasingly incapable of meeting these growing expectations for advanced digital and online experiences. This is especially the case when comparisons of an aged application ecosystem which involves over a dozen different vendor applications and hundreds of point-to-point integrations, is made to a modern inclusive suite of SaaS-based solutions that are designed to be seamlessly integrated.  To stay competitive as a comprehensive, research-intensive, land, sea, space and sun grant university, as we have done for over 150 years, OSU needs to deliver a digital pixel experience that distinguishes us as leaders in our brick and pixel future.​ This will involve not only a change in our technology and enterprise systems, but in how we operate moving forward to modernize and adapt to meet ever-evolving business needs.  

Workday is the Best Solution to Meet OSU’s Needs

To successfully allow for agility and deliver on the expectations of our students, employees and stakeholders across the state, nation and the world, we must be adept at managing our data.  One of the cornerstones of that success is bringing tools and technical solutions to OSU that deliver innovative and modern business processes and technology that is strongly rooted in industry best practice.   

Workday is a vendor that provides cloud-based software specializing in enterprise resource planning (ERP) that addresses the evolving needs of higher education institutions. We have seen a strong movement amongst our peers and partners across the nation and in the State of Oregon to replace and modernize their business processes and IT systems using Workday.  OSU is able to learn through our peer’s experiences and leverage contracts through our partnerships in higher education consortiums to streamline the competitive RFP process and thus engage in a more direct engagement and negotiation process with Workday.  This provides great advantages for OSU in the areas of pricing and time savings.   

The movement of our peers and partners to Workday is supported and informed by the company’s growing acknowledgement across the industry.  They are recognized as a leader in both the Gartner MQ for Cloud Core Financial Management Suites for the past five years, and the 2022 Magic Quadrant for Cloud ERP for Service-Centric Enterprises. InfoTech also demonstrates that Workday has been rated highly by peer institutions across the board in areas such as product feature satisfaction and vendor capability satisfaction. 

Through its innovative technology and approach to process design, Workday will enable OSU to adapt quickly to change; attract and retain faculty, staff, and student employees; free, share and protect OSU’S data.  The advantages to a modern suite of SaaS-based solutions can clearly be visualized in the innovative in-memory application design that incorporates formerly disparate functions like employee recruitment and retention; systemic redesign of procurement, contracts, grants, and financial reconciliations; financial and budgetary planning, modeling, reporting, and analytics; employee performance and development; time and expense tracking; capital project and labor optimization; and much more. These abilities and functionality allow OSU to ensure our enabling capabilities in administrative processes and technology fully support and empower our core capabilities in teaching, research, outreach and extension to deliver and elevate the value of what we do: 

Key features in Workday that align with SP 4.0 and the future plans strategic plan to integrate and simplify technology systems, data practices and policies that increase our organizational agility:
 

Agility 

• 100% cloud native to support our agility and need to move quickly and flexibly to meet the university’s needs. 

• Automatic and regular system updates that keep us modern, agile and aligned with best industry practices. 

•  In-memory architecture which ensures fast access to data throughout the suite of applications. 
   

Security 

• Provides security as a core competency across all of its platforms to protect data and reduce risk 

• Includes Disaster Recovery capability for greater resilience 

• Provides auditability of data and workflow transactions 
   

Fully-Integrated  

• A single platform designed for large organizations and features strong financial and human core management capabilities. 

• All-in-one system that allows a full picture of the people, financial, and student interactions and dependencies of our data and environment. 

• One consistent system with expanded capabilities that will help us streamline our complex technical environment including the reduction of duplicative systems across the university. 
   

Higher Education Experience  

• A focus on higher education and addressing the complexities of operating within a higher education institution.
   

User Experience and Automation 

• Streamlined and efficient business and financial processes that are digital, configurable, consistent, and automated, reducing paper-based and labor-intensive manual processes. 

• Capabilities for mobile interactions and self-service that will bring OSU to what our employees and students expect of their employment and education experience. 

• Self-service capabilities to better manage finance and HR tasks such as payroll, time tracking, expenses, and reporting. 
   

Enhanced financial planning, modeling, reporting and analytics.

• Provides real-time visibility into data and helps transform that data into information and insights. Data and insights around costs, transactions, revenue drivers, employee hiring, retention, and development, and to help meet evolving goals.
   

Improved opportunities to engage, enhance, and train employees.

• Empowers managers to focus on skills-based talent strategies; consolidate employee training requirements, fulfillment, and tracking; and utilize data-driven analytics to foster growth in a diverse environment.  

Everything that Happens at a University Happens Through its People

Digital transformation is not just about technology — at its core, it is a human story. Workday will allow us insight into our community and use it to understand and inform our internal operations — human resources, finance, planning, procurement, student operations, etc. — and versa, empowering us to build better user experiences across the university. It will help us build user experiences that provide a foundation for a robust talent management program at OSU that attracts, retains and develops a highly talented and diverse workforce to deliver on the university’s mission. It will also help us take a systems approach and better understand how each component of the university’s administrative operations impact, influence and support one another.