Skip to main content Skip to footer
Case Study
Public Service

WPI amps up its technology with Workday Student

Worcester Polytechnic Institute transforms critical functions to equal its world-class degree programs, ensuring a clear view of its students.

Call for change

Modernizing matriculation

Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) offers comprehensive project-based degree programs across more than 50 centers and six continents for 6,500 students, with an emphasis on technical expertise, science, and engineering. Yet the institution operated on a complex, 30-year-old legacy student system, with custom-built processes and multiple integrations. WPI wanted a more advanced system to match its world-class technology-focused education programs, improve the student, faculty, and staff user experience, maximize reporting efficiencies, and clean up existing data to make it more useful and transparent.

Workday Student presented the perfect alternative. Accenture was the ideal deployment partner, having successfully deployed Workday HCM, Finance and Payroll at WPI on time and on budget.

View Transcript

“…it’s important to have the right partners to work with. Our Accenture project manager and consultants were with us every step of the way.”

— Patty Patria, Former Vice President for Information Technology and CIO, WPI

When tech meets human ingenuity

Tracking the transformation

Accenture worked closely with WPI to identify all key requirements of a new Workday Student system and the redundant business practices to be eliminated. Together with WPI’s dedicated data conversion team we mapped all existing legacy data and translated it into a standardized format. When building the prototype, the teams recorded 60 legacy processes WPI wanted to maintain that Workday did not yet have functionality for. We helped the WPI team identify workarounds, reducing the list to less than 15.

WPI’s testing program was supported by Accenture’s Project Portal (TAPP), which logged all activities. TAPP enabled greater project transparency during remote delivery after the COVID-19 pandemic struck.

A valuable difference

Streamlining student strategies

Workday Student was deployed on schedule, with Accenture successfully loading 1.5 million transactions from 23 files to Workday with a 99.9% success rate and performing more than 100 integrations. Manual, paper-based processes are now automated and online. WPI is leveraging Prism to seamlessly integrate historical data with current operational data, saving WPI workers time and eliminating the need for training and maintenance of other tools.

Workday is also integrated with WPI’s COVID testing system and processes an average of 2,000 tests per day to support workers and students.

Since going live, WPI has successfully completed Fall 2021 and Spring 2022 registrations, with more than 4,500 unique students registered and 19,000 registrations each session. During the first registration time frame, 900 sophomore students registered for nearly 4,000 course sections in just one minute.

VIDEO

Advice to Higher Education CIOs from WPI

VIDEO

WPI finds success during COVID-19

VIDEO

WPI realizes efficiencies and automation

1.5M

Workday Student was deployed on schedule with 1.5 million transactions from 23 files successfully loaded to Workday.

99.9%

Transactions were uploaded to Workday with a 99.9% success rate, performing more than 100 integrations.

19K

More than 19,000 registrations were completed for both Fall 2021 and Spring 2022 students.

Meet the team

Timothy Rogers

Client Account Lead

Ryan R. Gaetz

Managing Director – Consulting, Accenture Workday Education & Government Lead
LinkedIn

Jackie Ruder

Engagement Manager

Robyn Wilson

Student Practice Lead

Related capabilities

Workday Education & Government

Accenture and Workday transform systems for student services, human resources, finance, and accounting.

Intelligent Platform Services

Realize the full potential of the world’s most powerful platforms. Push the boundaries of what tech can enable and transform your business at speed.

Talent & Organization

When businesses unlock the power of human potential, they access a new level of workforce transformation.