How Optimizing Your PeopleSoft Ecosystem Improves Higher Education Direction
Most recent innovations in the business side of higher education have been driven by technology. Whether it’s continuously evolving software or steadily increasing (and possibly overwhelming) data, change has been the only constant. Over the past few decades, we’ve seen how digital transformations can improve the educational experience for students while it helps administrators get more out of their limited budgets. Many administrators may consider technology to be outside of their decision realm, despite being daily users, but whether you are a technical export or an end user, technology has a daily impact on employees and students and therefore should be prioritized by all. Improved outcomes through technology is a top goal for many institutions, but many struggle to coordinate their investments in a way that moves the organization forward.
The Right Foundation: PeopleSoft
Administrators who use Oracle’s PeopleSoft application suite to manage their back-office and their student systems benefit from an extensible foundation that helps institutions maximize their technology investment. It also ensures that the right tools are in place to execute new technology solutions or cloud migration plans in the future.
Although PeopleSoft began as a tool for human resources, it expanded to include many other management tasks, including payroll, financials, student systems, and more. Many educators have benefitted from PeopleSoft’s Campus Solutions pillar and the applications that provide users with more control over academic outcomes:
- Student enrollment
- Campus community management
- Recruiting and admissions
- Student record management
- Academic advisement
- Financial aid
- Contributor relations
- Campus self-service
Higher education is competitive and getting more so. How can educators adapt their existing PeopleSoft solutions to contribute to the mission of the organization?
Optimize Your PeopleSoft Ecosystem
Cost-effective innovation through PeopleSoft is easier than you think—if you have the right application strategy behind you.
Start with a needs assessment and gap analysis to determine key functions missing from your current solution. Are your students getting the best enrollment experience? Has the organization adopted the Fluid interface to allow students to gain effective use of smart phones and tablets for enrolling? How is performance during enrollment? The student experience is a key success factor and slow response does not put the best foot forward. There are tactics that solve those problems.
Campus Solutions includes robust tools for student management, but organizations may benefit from additional modules that shore up their weak spots. Maybe a university needs help to uplevel their student recruiting capabilities. In these cases, integrating tools from PeopleSoft Customer Relationship Management (CRM) can be a helpful addition to the technology stack.
As part of your needs assessment, consider that you may not need new applications for each use case. Tools like PeopleSoft’s Fluid interface can also allow rebranding of each application’s UI. This allows schools to customize applications to different departmental needs or marketing initiatives set forth by administrators. Plus, the simple mobile flexibility inherent in the PeopleSoft product line means that the benefits don’t just apply to students; educators can use applications across any desktop, mobile, or tablet device.
After you choose which applications to offer your users, make sure things run smoothly from the technical side of things. A common way to improve efficiency here is to move selected PeopleSoft workloads to Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Compared with on-premise solutions, these clouds allow institutions to maintain a more nimble, flexible operating model. Essential IT management tasks are offloaded to a cloud service provider, and this allows schools to focus on education and leave IT administration to a partner.
Get the PeopleSoft Support Your School Needs with ERPA
One of the greatest improvements a higher education institution can make to improve its strategic direction is to work with an outside partner. A vendor who specializes in optimizing PeopleSoft management across migrations, management, and professional services can help schools identify which PeopleSoft applications and integrations will best fit the school’s unique IT ecosystem.
ERPA has provided PeopleSoft services for more than 20 years across countless businesses and educational organizations. If you’d like help to improve your PeopleSoft environment, contact us for an assessment.
