Brock University is heading for the cloud.
Over the next four months, Brock will move to replace its aging Finance system with one that meets disparate needs of staff and students. Brock will be the first Canadian university to embrace Workday, a cloud-based system that has been adopted by more than 1,000 organizations, from VISA to Yale University, HP and IBM.
The University’s Finance and IT staff have been working with Workday and Deloitte to configure the design for Brock. They intend to have the new system up and running by next spring, with a go-live date of May 1, the day after the University’s fiscal year-end.
In recent weeks, more than 300 Brock staff attended two information sessions in Pond Inlet, where they were given an overview of Workday. Information and FAQs about the new system are also available at ww.brocku.ca/workday. Or staff can view a video to see how a fully integrated Workday Higher Education system could work at Brock https://youtu.be/atWdtdnOuUo
David Cullum, Associate Vice-President of Information Technology, said Brock’s current financial system “is living on borrowed time.” Installed 30 years ago, when the University was less than half its current size, the current system is no longer supported by software upgrades.
In contrast, Workday’s developers provide semi-annual software updates to its customers, so the system stays abreast of changing technologies and needs.
Bryan Boles, Associate Vice-President of Financial Services, said Workday offers generational advances in efficiency and responsiveness. It will use less paper, and basic functions like cheque requisitions and expense reimbursements will move through the approval process by the click of a button instead of wading through inter-office mail.
The Brock team leading the initiative (called Project Phoenix) selected Workday after holding a series of consultation meetings across the University, where users and clients gave input on what they felt needed to happen.
“It’s extremely intuitive,” said Boles. “People can use and access the system to submit an expense reimbursement or just check the status of their accounts right from a tablet or phone.”
