Baylor University cuts costs and improves student experiences
Moving its financial and HR systems to Oracle Cloud ERP, EPM, and HCM helps the university spend where it counts: in the classroom and research lab.
“I’ve been in IT for 20 years, and I’ve never before seen a company’s products advance as quickly in a year as the Oracle Cloud products advanced. That investment is what really excited us.”
Business challenges
At a time when higher education budgets are tighter than ever, controlling costs, giving students exceptional research opportunities, and attracting the best faculty members are top priorities for Baylor University. One of the nation’s oldest universities west of the Mississippi, Baylor is focused on modernizing its legacy back-office processes and systems to create a foundation for achieving those goals.
Meantime, Baylor expects to realize cost savings from the application modernization, due to more efficient processes and better access to real-time data, freeing up some money for programs that enrich its students’ educational experience.
We have a partner ensuring that our system is secure. We have a partner ensuring that I have backup, that I have redundancy, that I have business continuity. And we have the same goals. If they’re successful, we're successful. If we're not successful, they're not successful.
Why Baylor Chose Oracle
Baylor’s IT and business leaders chose Oracle Cloud ERP, EPM, and HCM applications to increase efficiency and lower costs—and to take advantage of what one Baylor leader called “a true partnership in which our interests are aligned.” But the overarching reason was the strides Oracle has made in its cloud user interface design and the investment that those improvements represent.
Results
Before implementing the Oracle Cloud financial and HR applications, Baylor had a number of disconnected systems running different parts of its back-office operations, forcing employees to enter the same information over and over, which was not only repetitive, but also led to errors. Baylor’s implementation of Oracle Cloud Enterprise Resource Planning, Oracle Cloud Enterprise Performance Management, and Oracle Cloud Human Capital Management replaced 17 to 18 systems, with a far more intuitive UI.
Baylor is now able to tie financial information to HR information in one dashboard, so that university leaders have real-time information they can use to, say, determine what resources newly arrived researchers require or better understand how hiring trends are impacting the university’s financial health.
The university also has reduced the number of steps it takes to hire an employee, from 26 to 6 or 7. It attributes a $37 million increase in online education revenue in part to the introduction of simplified processes for onboarding students, and it has reduced the number of payroll runs from 11 a month to just 2.
Oracle Cloud’s first-rate security was a prerequisite. It was clear to Baylor leaders that security was built in at every layer of the environment—something they hadn’t seen with other cloud services they evaluated.