Uninavarra cuts days from student response times with Oracle
The Colombian educational institution taps PeopleSoft Campus and Oracle Cloud HCM to be provide higher-quality service to students and staff.
“We’ll continue to grow hand in hand with Oracle. This creates a greater confidence and assurance that the resources—given to us by our students—are being properly managed, and it’s enabling the university to keep up to date with global technology advances.”
Business challenges
Fundación Universitaria Navarra (Uninavarra) is a higher education institution founded in Neiva, Colombia, in 2010, offering 11 undergraduate, postgraduate, and engineering degree programs. More than 2,000 students study medicine, business administration, law, industrial engineering, and environmental engineering. Uninavarra is building a campus east of Neiva with a goal of increasing enrollment by 15% or more a year, so it needed a digital transformation to support those ambitions.
Uninavarra’s leaders knew they needed a partner to improve their academic and administrative processes and unify them onto a single platform, all to become much more efficient and provide higher-quality service. The project, dubbed “Proyecto Linda,” sought to optimize internal and student-oriented processes, such as replying to student requests for certificates or providing real-time availability of academic records.
Having the international backing of a company like Oracle lets us safeguard the greatest asset that we have at an institutional level—our data and the history of each member of the educational community.
Why Fundación Universitaria Navarra Chose Oracle
After touring Colombia to analyze which tools other schools used, and evaluating several suppliers, Uninavarra chose PeopleSoft Campus and Oracle Fusion Cloud Human Capital Management (HCM) to address these challenges. Oracle provided an array of solutions that could cover all internal needs, while also providing information security and process efficiency.
The institution deployed PeopleSoft Campus with the aim of meeting student needs for finding academic information. In a second stage, it began using Oracle Cloud HCM to support employees. The application helps the school generate trust and create a better work environment. Uninavarra felt Oracle provided a set of comprehensive solutions to solve the institution’s efficiency challenges, and the school appreciated having the backing of one of the world’s top technology companies.
Results
With PeopleSoft Campus, Uninavarra was able to slash the response time for a request from students, teachers, and managers from a maximum of 10 days to just 3 days, depending on the degree of complexity of the application. For example, a student request for an academic transcript used to take 3 to 5 days. Today it takes a maximum of 48 hours, which is the time it takes to validate the payment.
The school also simplified student registration using PeopleSoft. It used to work like this: The admissions department passed student registration information to finance, which generated payment receipts, then payment confirmation was passed to the registration department so the student could enroll. Now the student generates a payment receipt from the university platform with no manual intervention before enrolling.
Using Oracle Cloud HCM, Uninavarra has been able to improve human resources operations, bolstering both employee and student satisfaction. School leaders feel that they’ve achieved these goals while improving security and efficiency using Oracle.
COVID-19 led Uninavarra to shift from being completely campus-based to virtual. The university credits the Oracle applications for helping to continue quality service. Oracle’s solutions enabled the University to carry on with administrative and academic activities from home, something that would have been very complicated using the previous framework.