Baylor University hits its ambitious goals with Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP and HCM

Baylor University is a private university known for its high-ranking academic programs, research initiatives, and nationally competitive athletics, all founded on Christian values. The university’s distinctive identity and diverse range of academic programs helped it to grow by almost 30% in the last 10 years, to more than 20,000 students. In the early days of this growth initiative, however, it became clear that its outdated and disconnected on-premises finance and human resources applications would no longer support the evolving needs of students, faculty, and administrators. Baylor evaluated replacement systems with an eye to the future, seeking not just fixes to its immediate needs but also a platform that would support growth and innovation. Baylor was running most of the university’s core finance, human resources, and grant management operations on Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications for years, using it as a catalyst for continuous process improvements and now as a platform for AI innovation.

The university faced challenges with fragmented legacy systems across finance, human resources, and research administration. To support its growth goals, Baylor sought a unified, cloud-based system that could handle the complexity of a large, diverse academic environment. The university chose Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP, Oracle Fusion Cloud EPM, Oracle Fusion Cloud HCM, and Oracle Fusion Data Intelligence to replace its on-premises finance and HR systems. Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications Suite offered an integrated platform for ERP, grant management, and critical HR functions, including benefits, talent, time and labor, and payroll. Integrating finance and HR applications made it easier to analyze the financial impact of HR policies for more than 4,000 faculty and staff, and it reduced manual work for critical administrative activities.

Baylor implemented Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP and HCM for finance, projects, grant management, asset management, and human resources in 2020—in the midst of the university making major investments to increase enrollment and achieve certification as an R1 research institution. Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications helped the university execute on key priorities needed to reach R1 status, which it achieved three years ahead of the anticipated schedule. In the years since implementing Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications, Baylor has continually added new capabilities, with Oracle’s embedded AI features as its latest priority.

Using Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP, Baylor increased its capacity to manage externally funded grants, letting it handle far more grants with existing staff and significantly reducing the administrative workload for faculty, allowing them to focus more on academic pursuits. Baylor research expenditures from internal sources and external grants and contracts more than doubled between 2018 and 2022. Baylor also uses Oracle Fusion Data Intelligence’s prebuilt analytics and personalized dashboards to quickly view the status of each research grant.

In human resources, Baylor reduced its payroll cycles from 11 to just 2 using Oracle Fusion Cloud HCM. It streamlined its hiring process from 26 steps to 6, eliminating redundant data entry and associated errors. Using HCM’s time and labor tools, which are integrated with project and payroll systems, Baylor simplified time tracking and approvals for employees, reduced errors, and increased efficiency. The university nearly doubled its research staff from 2018 to 2022. With Oracle Cloud HCM, managers now have a better understanding of how hiring trends impact the university’s financial health, and they can easily track KPIs such as cost per hire, time to hire, and quality of hire.

In finance and procurement, the university spends about two-thirds less time completing key business processes such as purchase order processing and supplier onboarding. Before using Oracle Procurement, about 90% of purchases were going through procurement cards. Now those go through purchase orders and a pop-out marketplace, giving the university better control and economies of scale. In all, Baylor replaced 17 applications using Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications.

Baylor is looking to adopt embedded AI capabilities in Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications to accelerate administrative tasks such as invoice processing and job description creation and to automate repetitive processes such as proposal reviews. The university has systematically added capabilities and applications since its initial implementation, most recently going live on Oracle Fusion Cloud EPM Planning and Oracle Fusion Data Intelligence. As Baylor increases back-office efficiency, it’s able to devote more resources to student-facing initiatives.

With the new capabilities in Oracle Fusion Cloud’s quarterly updates, managers continuously evaluate how they’re executing the work in their areas of responsibility. For example, when Oracle released new capabilities for cost accounting, Baylor changed the way it handles labor cost distribution, adopting a new rule-based approach to how payroll costs are allocated across projects and grants are recorded in general ledger accounts.

“In my years working in technology, I have never seen an application suite advance as much as the Oracle Fusion Applications Suite has,” Allen says. “It’s like walking out to your driveway every couple of months and seeing that you have a totally different car than the one you originally purchased.”

Baylor works closely with Oracle Customer Success Services to get the most value from its Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications. For example, Oracle Mission Critical Support for SaaS helps IT staff efficiently run the cloud environments, Oracle Guided Learning provides employees with in-application contextual guidance, and Oracle Cloud Success Navigator helps Baylor adopt AI features.