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California State University Standardizes Administration Systems Across All 23 Campuses

• By Leila Meyer
• 03/22/12

California State University (CSU) has standardized its financial, human resources, student administration, and alumni development systems across all 23 of its campuses and the Office of the Chancellor. The move is part of the university's strategic plan, Access to Excellence, through which CSU has committed to take advantage of technology to meet the future educational needs of students, faculty, and staff.

The university is using Oracle PeopleSoft Applications hosted on the Unisys Hosted Secure Private Cloud Solution.

CSU uses PeopleSoft Financial Management for its financial management processes and systems, including general ledger, billing, accounts payable, accounts receivable, and purchasing. Prior to this initiative, each CSU campus operated a separate instance of PeopleSoft Financial Management. Under the new system, CSU has consolidated them all onto a single, university-wide instance to provide a unified view of financial operations, making this the largest single higher education deployment of PeopleSoft Financial Management in the United States.

CSU is now in the process of consolidating PeopleSoft Human Capital Management across its campuses. The goal of this consolidation is to reduce gaps in faculty compensation, increase the number of tenure-track positions, and attract and retain top faculty and staff.

The university also uses PeopleSoft Campus Solutions to manage class scheduling and registration, calculation and collection of student fees, financial aid awards, and student academic assessment.

"In order to continue to meet the goals of our strategic plan, we felt it was critical to standardize our operational processes--both in the back office and those that our students touch every day--by maximizing our technology investment and cutting costs," said Larry Furukawa-Schlereth, CFO, Sonoma State University, who's also chairman of CSU's Common Management System Executive Committee. "Having a single view of all important information in one system helps the California State University continue to offer excellent educational opportunities at affordable costs as we help shape the future quality of civic and economic life in California."

California State University serves over 412,000 undergraduate and graduate students and employs 43,000 faculty and staff at its 23 campuses and nine off-campus centers. It is the largest university system in the United States.

In other Oracle news, Metropolitan Community College in Kansas City, MO, has expanded its implementation of Oracle PeopleSoft Applications to include PeopleSoft Human Resources, Payroll for North America, Benefits, Campus Solutions, and Financial Management, in addition to PeopleSoft Human Capital Management (HCM) and PeopleTools. Oracle selected the college to be part of the company's Early Success Program, which provided support for the college's integration of PeopleSoft HCM and Campus Solutions, a project that was completed in October 2011. The goal of the project was to maintain a single, accurate record for each person at the college, regardless of role.