Using COmanage Tools to Support a Banner to Workday Transition: A Case Study from Wake Forest University

May 2024

Founded in 1834, Wake Forest University (WFU) is a private liberal arts university in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, with over 9,000 students, including approximately 5,400 undergraduates. In March 2024, WFU began introducing their student population to Workday Student, the final component of migrating their university information (ERP) system from Ellucian Banner to Workday.

Modernizing Student Information Systems

WFU began using Banner in 2005 for Student, Finance, and HR. In 2017, the University embarked on a strategic effort to modernize its Student Information System (SIS) and redesign associated processes and services to effectively and efficiently support its students, faculty, and staff in fulfilling their educational mission. WFU migrated its Finance and Human Resources functions to Workday in 2018, allowing for technology modernization and automation of departmental processes. This new solution gave users a comprehensive view of organizational data, with the flexibility to update and view personal information in real-time.

The final stage of the Workday migration included an overhaul of the Student Information System (SIS), which was planned to start in late 2020. However, the urgent challenges introduced by the global pandemic delayed these plans. The project was re-established in Fall 2022 with a progressive rollout of components between Fall 2023 and Summer 2024, after which a full cutover to support student information in Workday for the Fall 2024 semester. Promoted as “Project WakeDay,” the project team provided substantial communications, webinars, materials, and support to ensure a smooth launch. The WakeDay website touts the dynamic, mobile-friendly experience that expands access to secure, reliable data as a key benefit for the switch to Workday Student. More information about the process and activity around the Banner to Workday transition can be found on the Wake Forest Project WakeDay website.

The Challenge: New Software and Processes Leave a Hole

During the evaluation and planning phases of the migration project, the team identified several functions that would be supported at a different level in Workday. For over a decade, Wake Forest relied heavily on Banner as its primary tool for people registry and matching, making it an essential part of the university's infrastructure. However, the administrative processes, workflows, and software support under the Workday solution required a different solution, leaving a void where Banner's people registry and matching functions used to be. The university needed a new solution for identity management that could seamlessly integrate with the new infrastructure.

The Solution: Trusting in COmanage Tools

To address these challenges, Wake Forest turned to the COmanage Project’s open-source tools and software, which they were familiar with through their involvement with InCommon and other community resources. The university had several goals in mind for this solution:

• Create a central repository for all individuals associated with Wake Forest University.
• Efficiently match new individuals to existing ones across all populations to prevent duplication.
• Centrally assign unique WFU IDs to all new individuals coming into the university.
• Assign unique usernames for all individuals to be used for their email addresses.

The implementation process spanned about 18 months and was meticulously planned and executed. It started with a proof-of-concept phase to ensure COmanage was the right fit for their needs. This was followed by creating a development environment, allowing the team to test and tweak the system before going live. Finally, they built a production environment to achieve these goals for Student records. Production was fully ready for the scheduled go-live date in March 2024.

The Impact: Seamless Transition and Efficient Systems

The impact of the new identity management system has been considerable and overwhelmingly positive. The students are now using Workday to register for the Fall semester, illustrating the successful integration of the new system.

One of COmanage's significant advantages is its option to operate “behind the scenes.” Since it is not being used directly by users, there was no need for extensive training or notification to the broader university community. This characteristic streamlined the transition, reduced potential confusion, and eliminated the need for significant user support.

Furthermore, the team is continuously improving the system and how they use it. They have been actively tweaking the rules for matching incoming student records against their existing known population to ensure optimal outcomes and an efficient process. “It was important for us to have our Admissions staff be responsible for reconciling the potential matches that COmanage Match identifies.  They are closest to the data,” noted Seth Stein, Enterprise Systems Architect.  “Now they receive an email from Match when a potential match is identified, and with a few clicks, they can see all of the matched attributes and decide whether someone is previously known to the university or whether they should be assigned a brand new ID number.”

Given the success of using COmanage Registry and Match for student records, the WFU team is looking toward their use in HR processes. For example, currently, when new faculty or staff engage in the pre-hiring process at the University, they are assigned a WFU ID in Workday without any duplicate checking. These records are only checked for duplicates at the time of hire, causing additional work to reconcile and merge the data associated with the new and previous IDs for anyone with a prior or current set of records at the University. With effective matching provided by rules configured in COmanage Match, WFU expects to match to their existing population earlier, in the pre-hiring stage, enabling a streamlined onboarding process.

Lessons Learned: Reflecting on the Journey

Wake Forest is an early adopter of COmanage Match and faces the learning curve challenges typically encountered when there are no prior examples to follow.

What Match Rules? The key to successfully matching an incoming record about a person to current and past records is defining an effective set of Match Rules. COmanage Match offers substantial flexibility in defining these rules. However, it may take some time to develop a set that maximizes automatic correct matches and identifies legitimate potential matches requiring resolution by a team familiar with the population. The initial set of Match Rules that WFU deployed identified several matches from their legacy data that had gone undetected for years. WFU continues to refine its Match Rules through trial and error.  When Match Rules are too aggressive, University staff will spend more time reviewing and resolving potential matches.  When Match Rules are too conservative, this leads to more duplicates that must be cleaned up after the fact, resulting in additional work across many University departments. The WFU team has kindly agreed to collaborate with the COmanage project to initiate a library of Match Rule examples to aid future users.

Data Flow Order Among Match and Registry. The team retrospectively acknowledged that they might have approached the registry and matching process differently. Initially, there needed to be some clarification about whether to load records about people into COmanage Registry and then Match or vice versa. The team decided to load their records into Registry first and use Registry’s native integration with Match. Although the data for matching attributes are shared between Registry and Match, the set of these attributes is smaller than the relatively unlimited matching attributes allowed in Match. WFU’s match rules include attributes beyond those shared between the two tools, so they have opted to load this information into both tools to facilitate matching and to provide a complete view of the data to the Admissions staff when they are doing potential match reconciliation. The WFU team has provided feedback to the COmanage Project on enhancements to increase options for the shared records attributes between the tools.

This case study is an inspiration and a guide for any institution embarking on a similar project, underscoring the importance of careful planning, flexibility, and ongoing improvements in implementing successful system upgrades.