Case Study
University of Arkansas System (UASYS) Workday case study
Achieving higher education digital transformation with solutions from Deloitte and Workday.
The situation
The University of Arkansas System (UASYS), encompassing 21 institutions, struggled with inefficiency due to aging, campus-specific mainframes and outdated administrative enterprise resource planning (ERP) and student information systems (SIS). These legacy platforms led to inconsistent processes, siloed data, and heavy reliance on manual workarounds across finance, procurement, human capital management (HCM), payroll, and student administration processes.
To effectively support its educational and cultural advancement mission, UASYS needed a unified, modern solution that could facilitate efficient workflows and accurate, timely reporting.
The 21 institutions across UASYS relied on outdated, unreliable HR, ERP and SIS platforms that couldn’t support simple tasks, such as producing accurate headcount reports, without manual effort.
The solution
Workday’s technology, Deloitte’s experience
The University of Arkansas System selected Deloitte to implement Workday across all 21 institutions. The Deloitte team leveraged their higher education and Workday experience to configure a robust solution with several key components:
- Technology foundation: By consolidating over 30 legacy platforms into a single Workday instance, with Deloitte’s support, UASYS reduced technical fragmentation and established shared integration, security, and governance, while supporting institution-specific needs.
- Unified finance, payroll and human capital management: Deloitte designed and configured standardized processes and data structures to support consistent operations across diverse institutions.
- Workday Learning: Deloitte integrated advanced modules to centralize training content and align planning activities with institutional requirements.
- Workday Student: Deloitte leveraged Workday Student to enhance processes and support a more enriching student experience.
- Supply chain management: Specialized Workday functionality tailored to higher education and health care helped to address the complex procurement and inventory needs of the medical sciences campus.
- Organizational change management: Deloitte developed and helped deliver an effective engagement plan, including stakeholder mapping, targeted communications, and creation of Change Champion networks to foster readiness and adoption.
Deploying all of Workday HCM’s functionalities led to many ‘firsts’ for UASYS, including their first system-wide Open Enrollment and Performance Review cycle.
The impact
Higher education digital transformation
The collaboration between Deloitte and the University of Arkansas System delivered transformational results across the organization. All 21 institutions now operate on unified finance and human capital management platforms, reducing manual processes and improving consistency.
Throughout the transition, the team prioritized employee training and stakeholder engagement. Deloitte deployed over 350 learning courses to support ongoing development and gathered feedback from more than 400 stakeholders. Additionally, over 60 liaisons helped facilitate communication and training for smooth adoption of the new systems.
Transforming UASYS: by the numbers
Workers transitioned to Workday HCM & Financials
Business process configurations across HR, finance, procurement, and payroll
Reports and dashboards created
Courses and lessons deployed through Workday Learning
How UASYS used Workday Student to drive progress
As part of UASYS’ digital transformation, Workday Student helped streamline the student lifecycle for a system serving 70,000 currently enrolled students, helping:
Unify operations across 14 institutions by replacing 13 legacy systems with a single platform.
Enhance the student experience and lifecycle management—supporting more than six million student registrations across 100,000 courses and one million course sections.
Optimize and scale processes with over 330 redesigned workflows for records, advising, financials and admissions—supporting 4,500 programs of study and 500,000 student transcripts.
Enable effective adoption
through Deloitte’s guidance, custom tools, and change management, enabling 1,000 integrations and 1,200 custom reports.
Brad Cobbs
Patrick Hughes
Ted Montemayor
