Montgomery County Public Schools revamps processes with Oracle Cloud

Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) is the largest school district in Maryland and one of the largest in the entire United States. The district’s staff of 27,000 works to provide education for nearly 160,000 students with very diverse demographics.

Meeting the needs of so many internal and external stakeholders was becoming increasingly difficult due to funding limitations, causing MCPS to fall behind on system upgrades. Eventually, the technology deficiencies translated to higher costs and a lot of paper-based financial processes, resulting in hours of manual work and a growing number of headaches for everyone involved.

District leaders were demanding faster, more insightful reports so they could make proper data-driven decisions, but the systems required manual data entry and spreadsheet work which caused delays. Users could perform only single-segment workflows, so connecting the dots with the data was a huge challenge. A network of complex standalone applications that weren’t integrated further inflated the problem, as departments didn’t have the visibility they needed across the organization. When a change was made to one application, every other application had to be changed along with it, causing a disconnect that needed addressing.

MCPS knew it needed to make a change in order to provide transparency to parents and students, become more functional and strategic with its data, and scale for future growth.

MCPS was an Oracle E-Business Suite customer since 2007, and the organization trusted Oracle because of its past experience with the software. But when it came down to choosing the right solution, the sheer performance and flexibility of Oracle Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) made for a simple decision.

The organization saw the value of automatic upgrades within Oracle Cloud, as it would no longer have to worry about falling behind the technology curve with limited resources. This would enable MCPS to gain more capabilities that could be turned on and off to meet the changing needs of stakeholders.

The automation of Oracle Cloud ERP was another big advantage, empowering MCPS to rebuild broken processes and save employees time. These extra hours could in turn be used to focus on data analysis, gathering actionable insights, and providing faster reports to families and school superintendents.

Additionally, the district could decommission complex, outdated applications while consolidating and easily integrating the remaining systems to provide a strong foundation for collaboration. Adding in the scalability of Oracle Cloud would also empower MCPS to grow and meet future demands of stakeholders.

After implementing Oracle Cloud ERP, MCPS drastically reduced its paper-based payments and simplified processes for all stakeholders. One example revolves around retiree and family payments: Before moving to the cloud, the organization couldn’t process digital payments for things like school fees or insurance premiums, and people were frustrated having to write and submit paper checks. Today, MCPS can handle digital transactions, with 115 citizens moving to full-time electronic invoicing. The district has also seen a 4X increase in on-time payments.

The district eliminated manual, paper-based processes. Previously, the accounts receivable team spent a lot of time posting simple transactions and making sure statements were accurate. MCPS moved away from all these hours of manual work, allowing for more time troubleshooting, answering customer questions, and focusing on collections. Because of this, collections increased by 30% since implementing Oracle Cloud ERP. On the accounts payable side, employee reimbursements are now much faster. With all the systems integrated through Oracle, payments are approved quickly, and employees can easily check the details of their payment status on a single dashboard. This improved MCPS’ ability to leverage rebates by up to 7X. It also saved five days in tax prep for 1099s.

Streamlined payment processes also improved transparency and reduced compliance risk. MCPS monitors these payments and makes sure there aren’t any duplicates or other issues. With everything now paperless, data is easier to access and track and employees are more empowered to drill down into that data to resolve any discrepancies.

MCPS improved reporting to superintendents and principals with deeper, accurate, more actionable insights. Having all the data consolidated and integrated across systems has made it much more efficient to pull detailed reports. Leaders across MCPS can know at a moment in time how much money they have left in the budget for the fiscal year. This not only improves current spending but allows for more effective financial planning for future years.

Additionally, MCPS saved months of work on a process called early ordering, when the school district places orders for educational materials like textbooks and whiteboards during the current fiscal year to prepare for the next fiscal year. Thanks to the power of Oracle, MCPS uncovered that this process wasn’t necessary to get the materials that were needed. By removing this months-long process, hundreds of transactions and many hours of work were saved across every school in the network.

AST played a pivotal part in the continuing implementation of Oracle Cloud ERP at MCPS. From assisting with change management to getting users up to speed on new capabilities, AST guided the district every step of the way.