Dear Faculty and Staff Colleagues,
We write to share with you an update on the progress being made toward our transition to Workday, a software solution that will address human resources, payroll, financial and operational needs in ways our current systems simply cannot accommodate. As you may recall, President Bravman wrote to the campus last August explaining that Banner’s financial and HR tools have failed to evolve and have grown to be more of an obstacle to our work rather than a useful resource. Workday will help us address those challenges and provide us with a more useful, modern software tool. || Related: What is Workday?
Many of our colleagues in Finance, HR and L&IT have been working diligently on this transition. They have spent significant time designing the system, building integrations with other software tools, and converting vast amounts of data into the Workday environment, while ensuring the business processes that need to occur behind the scenes are well-designed and properly tested.
Because this transition is about improving those daily processes, and since a successful adoption of Workday will benefit each of us in various ways, we are taking extra time to implement this new resource. As a result, we have decided to move the Workday launch from this summer to later in the 2017-18 academic year. We will continue to work with our implementation partners, Workday and Sierra Cedar, throughout the process. We have also consulted with similar schools that have either completed or are in the middle of the transition to Workday, and we have learned that many of those institutions extended their implementation timelines as well in order to ensure a successful launch. It is important to note that student and other academic data will not be impacted by this project.
We will continue to post updates and useful information to bucknell.edu/workday. You will find there a variety of resources, including FAQs, commonly used Workday terminology, an introduction to our Project Team and Workday Ambassadors, and more. We have also created this form for you to ask Workday-related questions.
We thank you for your continued support of this very important endeavor. We will keep you informed as new and relevant information becomes available.
Sincerely,
Param Bedi, Vice President for Library & Information Technology
Pierre Joanis, Vice President for Human Resources
Dave Surgala, Vice President for Finance & Administration