Santa Clara Switches to Workday

Change comes in response to Oracle phasing out its eCampus software program

It is that time of the quarter again. But as students register for fall quarter classes, they are encountering a new software to enroll in classes. 

For the first time in 30 years, Santa Clara students are not using eCampus to register for classes. eCampus, initially purchased by Santa Clara in the early 1990s, was the enterprise resource planning (ERP) software of choice for many universities. 

In the decades since the purchase, Santa Clara has made significant changes to the software to keep up-to-date, as eCampus only changed if it was updated by Santa Clara staff. Bob Owen, chief information officer of Santa Clara, and Director of Enterprise Applications Kax Joseph, are excited for the change away from eCampus.

“It was a good package,” said Owen. “But it is now difficult to maintain and support. I would even go so far as to say it is unsustainable.”

The search for a new ERP began in the spring of 2015, and a committee was created to begin testing different programs. The committee decided on Workday in 2016 and the implementation process began two years later. The actual transition began when HR software transitioned to Workday HR in Sept. 2019. The software was received positively by faculty, who were able to give feedback at panels and other in-person events. 

While other schools across the country are also using Workday for some aspects of their HR and financial systems, Santa Clara is the first to switch to its full platform.

The largest difference between these two programs are their security and disaster recovery systems. eCampus was an on-premise package, meaning all of its controls live on Santa Clara’s campus in the Learning Commons. Workday is a cloud-based system–the information is kept and backed up in many places all over the country. This decentralized approach allows for greater data protection.  

Although many staff members and students were initially skeptical, some now prefer Workday to eCampus. 

“It was clumsy at first, but it’s become much easier,” said Michael Whalen, chair of the communication department. “There are a lot of things that happen on the back end for professors that students don’t know about, like permission numbers for added classes or approving courses for students going abroad, that now include less steps.”

However, after training and implementation sessions with faculty, many agree that this software is extremely intuitive, and the students will have almost no trouble making the transition. 

“People are going to resist this change just because they don’t like change,” said Whalen. “The university is making this change because they need to, not because they want to.”

Many students, however, feel that the change was very sudden. These students, especially rising seniors, are concerned about the little warning they received about such a major change to something that affects their registration process, financial information, academic records and other important aspects of their education. 

“I read the subject line of pretty much every email I get from the school,” said junior Alex Beccari, a business and psychology major. “I hadn’t seen anything about Workday until the email they sent a few weeks ago.”  

COVID-19 hindered the process as review panels were moved online. This made getting feedback more complicated, but Workday Finance still went live in January 2021. The implementation of the HR and Finance systems gave the university’s IT department the experience and knowledge they needed before rolling out the student package.

Students have training sessions and reference guides available to them and are recommended to begin reviewing these resources before registration for fall courses. If there are any errors found while using the new software, students are advised to contact WorkdayStudent-group@scu.edu so that these problems can be resolved.