Cornerstone MIAMI UNIVERSITY FINANCE AND BUSINESS SERVICES
Workday Project Full Speed Ahead With the official project kickoff a little over a month away, the Workday project team is already hard at work getting things moving forward. Workday is a cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) system that will replace our current legacy Banner system. By implementing Workday, Miami will transform how it delivers essential business services and provide seamless end-to-end experiences for faculty, staff, and students. According to Miami’s Senior Vice President for Finance and Business Services, David Creamer, Workday will be a perfect replacement for Miami. “The Banner finance system has not kept pace with the many enhancements that modern finance systems provide to organizations today. Too much time and money are being spent on the integration of other software products or workarounds that the Workday finance system will eliminate.” The technology that drives Workday also makes it an appealing addition to Miami, Vice President for Information Technology and CIO, David Seidl notes, “It's exciting for a lot of reasons - as an IT person, it lets us focus on value-added work instead of maintaining the guts of an ERP. It will empower folks across the institution - Workday builds in a lot of easy access to underlying data allowing
that data to be leveraged effectively right away by those who need it the most. It also really puts an emphasis on what we're calling ‘leading practices’ - patterns, workflows, and processes that have been broadly successful across many organizations around the world. Unlike our Banner implementation in the late ‘90s where we hauled mainframe-era and Miami specific practices into the implementation, this time we'll be focused on those leading practices to help us be better and more efficient.” Seidl also noted the importance of the timing with regards to making the transition to Workday. “We've been carefully watching the market for a few years waiting for this moment. While cloud ERP vendors had mature finance and HR modules, student modules built for higher education were trailing. At the same time, our existing technology was becoming dated and wasn't meeting our needs - so we knew our moment was now!” Creamer agrees that a change was needed, and sooner rather than later. “Ellucian is in the early stages of taking its Banner product in a different direction to compete with software as a service product like Workday. Instead of this change being forced on Miami by its current vendor, Miami is able to control when and what product it will implement and to receive the benefits of an improved system much sooner.” Continued on the next page