Community Colleges Leverage Oracle Solutions to Meet Growing Student Demands While Minimizing Costs

Oracle is working with community colleges throughout the United States to help them face the increasing challenges of rising enrollments, decreasing state budgets and dynamic student demands for high-quality services.

Oracle’s solutions are uniquely designed to meet the needs of modern institutions with Web-enabled capabilities – such as online class registration, electronic pay stubs, enrollment analytics and enhanced communication tools – that increase operational efficiency while minimizing costs.

Lone Star College System (www.lonestar.edu/index2.htm) (LSCS), one of the largest and fastest growing community colleges in the country, turned to Oracle’s PeopleSoft Enterprise applications to help manage a 25 percent annual growth rate, which caused longer registration lines and slower system response times under the college’s legacy system.  In only 18 months, LSCS went live with Oracle’s PeopleSoft Enterprise Financials (www.oracle.com/us/products/applications/peoplesoft-enterprise/financial-management/index.html) , Oracle’s PeopleSoft Enterprise Human Capital Management (HCM) (www.oracle.com/us/products/applications/peoplesoft-enterprise/hcm/052833.html) and Oracle’s PeopleSoft Enterprise Campus Solutions (www.oracle.com/us/products/applications/peoplesoft-enterprise/campus-solutions/index.html) .  Students, faculty and staff logged into the new portal, known as iStar, more than one million times during the first month following implementation, with no availability or performance issues.  A record 66 percent of LSCS students registered for classes online – drastically reducing on-site queuing challenges.  The deployments help LSCS enhance business process consistency between its five colleges while maintaining top-level user acceptance by students and faculty, even as enrollment has increased by 18,000 students in two years.

Kentucky Community and Technical College System (www.kctcs.edu/) (KCTCS), which includes 16 campuses and 70 locations across Kentucky, turned to Oracle for a centralized administrative application suite to mitigate the effects of state funding reductions. KCTCS runs a single statewide instance of PeopleSoft Enterprise Campus Solutions, PeopleSoft Enterprise HCM and PeopleSoft Enterprise Financials. It is also implementing PeopleSoft Enterprise Data Warehouses using PeopleSoft Enterprise Campus Solutions, PeopleSoft Enterprise Financials and Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (www.oracle.com/us/solutions/ent-performance-bi/enterprise-edition-066546.html) . With an integrated administrative system, the Commonwealth of Kentucky has significantly reduced operating costs while enhancing efficiency and the student experience across its entire community college system. The self service centers in PeopleSoft Enterprise Campus Solutions have allowed students and faculty to help themselves with a robust offering and scalability that has met the tremendous growth KCTCS has seen over the past ten years.

Seminole State College of Florida (www.seminolestate.edu/) is the ninth largest school in the Florida College System and was the fastest growing in credit enrollments during the 2009-10 school year. Since its legacy student services system was not Web-enabled or capable of supporting thousands of concurrent users, the college turned to Oracle for the scalability required to support self-service demands. Seminole State implemented PeopleSoft Enterprise Campus Solutions, PeopleSoft Enterprise Human Resources, PeopleSoft Enterprise Financials and Oracle’s PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal (www.oracle.com/us/products/applications/061863.html) in 14 months to provide self-service functionality to more than 30,000 users. These capabilities saved the institution money by moving more than 20,000 financial documents online, eliminating payroll checks in favor of 100 percent electronic pay-stubs and payroll distribution and providing grades to students online. In addition, despite reductions in state funding, the institution enhanced communication and information dissemination to students and employees.

Houston Community College System (www.hccs.edu/portal/site/hcc) (HCC), one of the largest community college districts in the United States, continued to reap the benefits of its PeopleSoft Enterprise Campus Solutions 9.0 deployment, improving service to students and prospective students with enhanced online services. For example, online payment options enable students to pay when they enroll instead of after classes start. This stabilizes enrollments and helps HCC better predict class sizes, which improves efficiency and fiscal stability while driving revenue. In addition, HCC recently migrated to electronic timesheets via Oracle's PeopleSoft Enterprise Time and Labor (www.oracle.com/us/products/applications/peoplesoft-enterprise/hcm/053326.html) , which is expected to reduce paperwork by 80 percent, increasing payroll accuracy and amounting to an annual savings of $1.15 million.

“State budget reductions have placed increasing pressure on community colleges. Even as budgets shrink, enrollments and constituent demands are increasing. To meet the modern student’s needs on a limited budget, institutions are turning to Oracle for flexible, affordable software solutions that help them provide better service while reducing operational costs,” said Steve Koporec, vice president, applications, Oracle Higher Education.

“Considering our rapid enrollment increases, it was vital to have an enterprise resource planning solution that can effectively handle our administrative and student services. By implementing one of the biggest Oracle PeopleSoft footprints in the nation, we were able to move a majority of our class registrations online, increase our operational efficiency and enhance the student experience,” said Shah Ardalan, vice chancellor and chief information officer, Lone Star College System.

“Due to their multi-institution capabilities and flexibility to adapt to varying business processes, Oracle’s PeopleSoft Enterprise applications were ideal for integrating administrative functions across our 16 campuses and 70 locations,” said Paul Czarapata, chief technology officer, Kentucky Community and Technical College System.

“Considering tough economic conditions, it was vital to make Seminole State as efficient as possible. With Oracle’s PeopleSoft Enterprise applications, we Web-enabled many financial and human resource initiatives to reduce operating costs and increase communication between students, faculty and staff,” said Dick Hamann, vice president, information technology and resources/chief information officer, Seminole State College of Florida.

“Oracle’s PeopleSoft Enterprise applications have made us a leaner, more efficient institution. We can better predict enrollments, enhance payroll accuracy and eliminate unnecessary paper waste, leading to $1.65 million in savings,” said William Carter, vice chancellor of information technology, Houston Community College System.

Oracle in Higher Education (www.oracle.com/industries/education/highered.html)

Oracle’s Higher Education Solutions Fit the Unique Needs of Community Colleges – White Paper (www.oracle.com/industries/education/pdfs/oracle-education-community-college-br.pdf)