Peralta CC Completes Transition to PeopleSoft ERP

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 04/24/08

Peralta Community College District has completed a migration from legacy enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications to PeopleSoft 8.9, according to the professional services company hired to guide the college on its implementation. RWD Technologies said the decision to migrate Peralta to the Oracle platform was driven by the need to unify separate ERP processes across the four-campus system.

"When we decided to upgrade our ERP system to one that we knew would standardize and improve processes, we encountered a degree of faculty and staff resistance within each college, including resistance from campus leadership who were comfortable with the procedures that were already developed," said Howard Perdue, vice chancellor of student services. "We were fortunate that RWD helped us implement a system that is now providing a high level of student service and consistent business processes across our campuses."

To manage the transition, RWD consultants leveraged RWD InfoPak, a proprietary documentation and simulation tool to create business process documentation for the three PeopleSoft modules adopted by the district: student administration, HR management and financial management. RWD also recognized that Peralta needed a method to address the change management issues it faced during the implementation.

The school addressed the resistance issue by working with a change management program developed by RWD that included an organizational assessment that helped Peralta understand the leadership, business readiness and communication issues that would come with the transition. RWD then developed an aggressive training regiment comprised of instructor-led classroom training and online web-based training. Finally, RWD recommended a set of best practices for the PeopleSoft system that were based on practices already established by employees under the older ERP system.