Human resources, payroll and other finance operations have shifted from the software PeopleSoft to Workday, Chief Information Officer Jim La Creta told The Brandeis Hoot in an email. Brandeis has used PeopleSoft since 2002 and decided to change to Workday to reduce the complexity of administrative systems. 

PeopleSoft systems are customized for each organization that uses it, La Creta added, making the system more complicated to use than Workday. All faculty, staff and student employees shifted to Workday on July 1, according to Christine Jacinto, the Associate Director of Change Management and Strategic Communications for Workday. 

“These customizations added a layer of complexity to our administrative systems, making system upgrades and modifications challenging and disruptive for our vendors and staff,” he wrote to The Hoot.

La Creta said in the email that the transition to Workday is representative of the university’s progress in “campus modernization.” Workday is much more user-friendly and enables all faculty, staff and student employees to access Workday from anywhere at anytime. 

Workday also offers improved security to the university’s data and personal information of employees on campus, said La Creta. Workday simplifies, standardizes and automates different human resources processes that originally needed to be done through paper with PeopleSoft. La Creta added that Workday would decrease the university’s carbon footprint by “eliminating paper timesheets and paper-based processes,” such as the new hire process and benefits enrollment. 

The biggest difference between the processors for PeopleSoft and Workday is that Workday is a cloud-based system. 

“This will enable us to keep up-to-date with new versions and functionality more efficiently,” he wrote. “And it will enable us to run operations in a more secure environment using Workday’s strict security protocols.” 

There was a lengthy evaluation process for multiple platforms before the university settled on Workday, Associate Vice President of Information Technology Services Anne Marando told The Hoot in an email. 

“Workday integrates with dozens of other systems on campus including the system used by the finance department to process payments to vendors and the system used by the student financials department to process tuition payments,” she added. 

Overall, Workday is a much more simplified system as opposed to PeopleSoft, Workday Systems Manager Cathy Jameson told The Hoot. Jameson added that Workday is a much more condensed system with a modern interface that is more intuitive and secure for users compared to PeopleSoft. She added that Workday updates itself every six months. 

In the past with PeopleSoft, “updates were delivered to Brandeis and had to be installed manually. It required teams from each administrative area to apply and test the updates. The upgrade process could span over several months,” Jameson explained.

Workday combines three previous PeopleSoft systems that the university used: PeopleSoft Human Resources/Payroll, PeopleSoft Campus Solutions and PeopleSoft Financials, according to Jameson. PeopleSoft Human Resources/Payroll, known to most as Brandeis University Self-Service (BUSS), was the original method to hire, pay and assign benefits to all employees on campus. PeopleSoft Campus Solutions, also known as Sage, was the student information system. PeopleSoft Financials processed and maintained financial accounting for the university. 

Marando told The Hoot in an email that BUSS and PeopleSoft Financials have already been upgraded to Workday. She continued that Sage’s upgrade to Workday is set to fall 2019. When the transition is complete, Sage’s functions will be performed in the “student implementation” section of Workday. 

“This is a multi-year initiative and will provide updates to the community as the project continues,” Marando added. 

Implementation has already begun. There have been over 450 new hires and rehires, almost 7,000 weekly timesheets filled out and nine weekly and four semi-monthly payrolls on Workday since Aug. 31, 2019, wrote Jacinto to The Hoot.