For nearly 25 years, University of Northern Iowa employees have known Oracle E-Business as their one-stop shop for financial and human resources transactions. But this will be changing soon as UNI implements a cloud-based product called UNI WORKS. 

“Our current system has served us well for a long time, but there's been a lot of custom development work over the years to introduce new functionality,” said Marty Mark, chief information officer at UNI.

UNI WORKS is powered by Workday, which immediately stood out as a top contender when UNI started to consider new software options. The State of Iowa uses Workday for human resource management, and Iowa State University uses it for both HR and finances. It is used extensively in the higher education industry and has a remarkably high customer satisfaction rating of 98%.

The new UNI WORKS system will impact everyone across campus - whether that’s a student applying for a job, a candidate who gets offered a position and even a current staff member viewing their paycheck or pulling a travel spend report. It will also allow staff members to conveniently access more information on their mobile devices. 

“One of the things that's exciting about the new product is it's highly integrated, and it's very intuitive,” said Mark. “It's got a lot of the functionality that we need already embedded into it.”

Changing from one system to another has been a monumental task, drawing on the expertise of nearly 150 employees from across campus in addition to external consultants. Some of the team members are heavily involved, such as those who work in human resources or IT. Others volunteered to be a part of the process by testing out the software.

“It takes a whole team to make sure we get this done right,” said Michael Hager, senior vice president of finance and operations at UNI. “Any time an organization goes through an upgrade of this magnitude, it's going to stress the organization. But we have some really, really good staff at the university, and they're all stepping up in amazing ways.”

Training for UNI WORKS will begin rolling out to employees later in the spring semester to get them ready for the July 1 change.

“The amount of time and energy and thought process that people are devoting to this to get it right is remarkable,” said Hager. “I can't overestimate both the amount of work they're doing and the appreciation we have. Our consultants are telling us that as a university, we are ahead of the game compared to most other organizations they’ve worked with. It is a true testament to the great staff that we have at the university.” 

To follow along on the progress of the transition to UNI WORKS, go to uniworks.uni.edu.