Oracle Customer Study

Santa Clara University

The Customer Business Challenge
• Industry: Higher Education
To offset rising costs and keep tuition affordable, Santa Clara
• Geographics: Santa Clara,
University wanted to shift to a more strategic budgeting process
• California Budget: $200
Million
that would improve the efficiency and effectiveness of how its
• Employees: 1,500
resources are allocated and spent across departments.
• Students: 4,300
PeopleSoft Solution
Undergraduate and 3,100
Graduate Students Santa Clara University standardized on Oracle’s PeopleSoft
PeopleSoft Enterprise
Enterprise Budgeting to create a new, more tightly integrated
Solutions budget and reporting structure that would streamline the budget
• Financial Management
planning and management processes and integrate senior
management more into the budgetary process. Santa Clara
• Service Automation
University recently upgraded to PeopleSoft Enterprise Financial
• Treasury
Management 8.8 to maximize those synergies even further.
• PeopleSoft Enterprise
Performance Management
Business Benefits
Financial Analytics
Supply Chain Analytics Santa Clara University uses Budgeting to fulfill these business
Workforce Analytics requirements:

Implementation Team • Online access to integrated, accurate budgeting and financial

PeopleSoft Consulting data supports the shift to strategic budgeting.
Customer Service Level • Tight integration with Financial Management eliminates
Standard costly interfaces and duplication of planning efforts.
• Drill-down analysis capabilities facilitate data reconciliation,
“As a private university, we need consolidation, and verification against university budget
to keep our tuition afford-able, targets.
and that means making sure that
we are maximizing internal • Faster budget reconciliation frees analysts to focus on more
efficiencies. PeopleSoft value-added activities.
Enterprise Budgeting is
supporting that effort by helping • Easy-to-use, intuitive interface and drag-and-drop
us become more strategic in the functionality improve employee productivity.
way we budget and allocate
resources.” Santa Clara University Moves to Strategic Budgeting with
Dennis Roberts PeopleSoft
Budget Director It’s not easy being a private university these days. Your
endowment was hammered during the stock market downturn,
but you can’t risk raising tuition too much to make up for the short
fall. So what do you do? If you’re a finance executive at Santa
Clara University (SCU), you adopt a more strategic approach to
budgeting in order to plan and allocate your tuition resources
more effectively. And you standardize on PeopleSoft Enterprise
Budgeting, drawing on its best practices and tight integration with
PeopleSoft Enterprise Financial Management to give your
management team and financial analysts access to the tools and
information required to allocate resources more efficiently and
effectively.

Copyright © 2004, 2005 Oracle. All rights reserved. Printed in the U.S.A.
 Oracle Customer Study

“Implementing a strategic budgeting approach
means getting our senior management more
involved in the budget process, providing them
with direct access to the information they need
to better align budget decisions with the
university’s broader strategic goals,” explains
Dennis Roberts, budget director, Santa Clara
University. “To get that information, we needed
tighter integration between our budgeting and
financial applications, and that meant replacing
Hyperion Pillar with PeopleSoft’s budgeting
product.”
Goodbye Custom Interfaces
Before rolling out Budgeting, Roberts and his
team worked directly with several hundred
departments to gather the operational
information used in the budget planning and
preparation process. A custom interface was
created to bring financial information coming
from the university’s PeopleSoft financial
system into Hyperion Pillar. By standardizing
on Budgeting, SCU eliminated that costly
interface and much of the duplicative data-
gathering and analysis efforts that went along
with it.
“We’re very pleased with the ease of
integration between Budgeting and our other
applications,” enthuses Tex Peacock, project
lead for the PeopleSoft implementation at
SCU. “All the custom processes that we had to
write between Hyperion Pillar and PeopleSoft
are gone.”
“You can pull in all the essential data you need
for budget analysis and planning, such as prior
year history and current budgets,” says
Roberts. “Having that information online and
readily available is eliminating a lot of
duplicative efforts. Our budget analyst, for
example, has saved a tremendous amount of
time because the reconciliation process is so
much faster.”
One-Stop Shopping Will Deliver Huge
Savings
Budget officials at SCU have big plans for
Budgeting as they enter their second budget
cycle using the application. For Roberts, that
means creating a “one-stop shopping
experience” for departments, using Budgeting
to do both salary and budget planning
simultaneously. Currently, these processes are
handled separately, creating lots of
overlapping effort, but Roberts and his team
see major benefits from using Budgeting to
make this a single, integrated process.
“We currently have 50 or 60 users who have to
do salary planning then duplicate that effort
during the budget planning process,”
concludes Roberts. “Once we’ve eliminated
that duplication, we anticipate realizing major
savings, freeing weeks of planning time that
our staff can use instead to improve the
performance of their individual departments.”

SCU recently upgraded to Financial

Management 8.8 to further extend the benefits
of the tight integration between PeopleSoft
budgeting and financial applications.
PeopleSoft Enterprise Cash Management 8.8,
for example, will help the university’s Finance
department generate more reliable cash
forecasts, perform automatic bank
reconciliations, and auto-mate fund transfers.

Seeing Tremendous Upside

In addition to the tight integration between
modules, the more than 100 employees who
are using Budgeting at SCU also appreciate
the intuitiveness of the applications and real-
time access to financial data. “We’ve been
through one budget cycle already using
Budgeting, and the tool has a tremendous
upside,” adds Roberts.

Copyright © 2004, 2005 Oracle. All rights reserved. Printed in the U.S.A.