Menu
Mike Dickson, Chief Innovation Officer at Collin College, and Robert Steele, Vice President, Higher Education at Workday, share the benefits of purchasing an ERP system through the E&I Workday agreement.
Dickson: Our current ERP system is SQL based. It is hosted onsite, and we have programmers whose entire jobs are to handle the programming for this system. It was great for its time, as it had everything we needed when we first purchased it back in 1987 and updated it in 2005.
Dickson: Our current provider offered us storage on their servers, but they didn’t have a true cloud offering, and the updates they provided to us were largely cosmetic. We cannot shut down our college just to switch software, but this was required with our current system, which also included third party software and integrations that didn’t work well for us. We all strongly felt that we couldn’t continue to do business that way.
Dickson: We created a working group of 60 faculty and staff members on both sides of the fence—those that were having issues with and those that supported our current ERP system. We dove deep into the major providers and Workday took the lead.
After several months of evaluations, we arrived at a consensus to move forward with Workday because:
Dickson: Using the E&I contract has enabled us to focus on the ERP implementation and what we wanted to accomplish, rather than focusing on the procurement process. E&I made the legal side easier since we didn’t have to break any new legal ground or spend the time going through the RFP process. This was very important to us—as it saved us a tremendous amount of time and money.
Steele: The benefits of selecting Workday through the E&I contract span the entirety of a project lifecycle: selection, procurement, and deployment. We have a deep history of successfully partnering with higher ed customers, and streamlining the selection process through E&I further accelerates the time to value with Workday. Upon selecting Workday, Collin College saved time and money during the procurement process by leveraging terms and conditions already pre-negotiated by E&I. This enabled Collin to focus on the strategic aspects of its cloud transformation journey. Additionally, leveraging E&I’s Workday agreement accelerated Collin’s start of the project, enabling them to move more quickly to realize the value of its migration to the cloud.
Dickson: We are mainly looking for ease of use, scalability, and the ability to add additional staff and enable staff members to be more productive with automated processes through Workday. We also need to better meet the expectation of users—young adult students who are used to placing orders through their computers or smart devices rather than waiting in line for service.
Steele: Utilizing Workday through the E&I contract lets members quickly realize the benefits of moving planning, finance, and HR to the cloud. While higher education grapples with unprecedented financial pressures, many institutions also face looming decisions about the future of their aging ERP systems. The evaluation cycles to replace these systems are resource-intensive, requiring large investments of money and time to evaluate, select, procure, and deploy a new solution. E&I has simplified the process by doing the legal and pricing negotiations ahead of time for the benefit of its members.
Utilizing E&I’s Workday agreement enables E&I members to streamline their evaluations efficiently and expedite their paths to the cloud. Members can do so with confidence, as the agreement was negotiated by procurement and legal experts at peer member institutions. This means that E&I members can invest more of their precious resources where they belong: on their respective missions.
Workday, Inc. is a leading provider of enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications, with a fully cloud-native platform developed for higher education.
