The university announced that it will be implementing the Workday System, replacing the PeopleSoft system that has been a part of the technology for Leonet and on-campus jobs.

Alongside other members in the University of Louisiana system, the university will be joining a new enterprise resource planning system, otherwise known as ERP, for the next school year.

Dr. Kay Maurin, chief enrollment management officer, explained why the university chose to change its systems.

“PeopleSoft is a product that is nearing the end of support and will not be further developed,” explained Maurin. “Workday is a more user-friendly product that provides superior ease of accessing data and information for decision making and planning.”

According to the university website, ERPs will integrate all of an organization’s departments, divisions, lines of business and locations into a more uniform system for enterprise and resource.

Beginning to work on the transition to Workday back in 2018, the university has recently started this year with the testing phase of Workday to departments with the efforts of end-to-end testing, university, user acceptance and parallel testing for departments and user training.

Maurin commented on how the process has gone so far in terms of fluidity.

“The implementation process has been very positive,” explained Maurin. “It has provided an opportunity to look at current practices and business processes to ensure we are providing the best experience to our users while also enhancing efficiencies. Most noteworthy is that this implementation is being done in partnership with Louisiana Tech University and the University of New Orleans and has resulted in significant cost-savings.”

Maurin further stated that the transition has not faced any roadblocks in her department or others, but the main challenge, given the coordination of working both with learning Workday and respective department affairs, has been time management.

Since August 2018, the efforts of the university departments have been productive with over 300 units of training, over 2,100 hours of consulting services, over 30 visits to each universities’ human resources, financial aid offices, integration and data conversion teams. According to Maurin, all the groups involved in the university’s implementation have been excited in the product and the manner it will work.

With a goal set for fall 2020, Maurin explained the status of the goal date and expectations upon launch.

“The Human Capital Management and the finance modules are on schedule to deploy in July 2020,” explained Maurin. “The Student Module users are currently working through advanced discovery. Once advanced discovery is completed, implementation will begin and is expected to last between two to three years.”