Ellucian Colleague vs. Oracle PeopleSoft HCM

Ellucian Colleague is wonderful at streamlining processes and unifying data related to students, finance, human resources, and financial aid. It continues to support and manage administrative needs, enhance student experiences, and improve operational efficiency across the University. Ellucian Colleague is less suited for quick data retrieval and comprehensive financial reporting. These functions could use some improvement to optimize the user experience.

Oracle PeopleSoft HCM is great for onboarding new hires. The process, including some newer direct entry features, has been streamlined and made more intuitive. However, there is a steep learning curve for those who are completely unfamiliar with enterprise systems as a whole. In my experience, Oracle PeopleSoft HCM's updates have historically failed to improve the intuitiveness of navigation and features even through a move to a SaaS configuration in the cloud. This makes it hard to train new HR staff because there may be five different ways to accomplish the same thing and none of them are intuitive enough to just "figure out". This has been a bone of contention for me for all Oracle products for my entire 20+ year career, and it has never been fully addressed.

Incentivized

• Colleague Student allows us to integrate services across the university for students with staff in various departments able to see the information about a student that they need to serve the student well.
• Colleague Student makes it easy to see our students current academic record as well as transfer courses (and information) and their past records here at the university. Our old system required a lot of homegrown connection points to be able to see all of this information. It was neither quick nor easy.
• Colleague Student makes the registration process for our students much easier. Our old system was clunky and would often prevent students from registering for a class but not provide information for them about why. Colleague Student makes it easy for students to see if they are missing a pre-requisite, have a hold, etc., so they can know how to get their registration back on track.

Incentivized

• Oracle PeopleSoft HCM is one of the best product and has helped implement the complex Business functionalities in the Higher Education business in a very streamlined process.
• Oracle PeopleSoft HCM helped in moving from 34 different legacy system to one centralized system which helps immensely in maintaining the data and reporting purpose.
• Oracle PeopleSoft HCM also helps immensely in data analytics and trend analysis which helps immensely in preparing for the resourcing and planning for the peak season in advance and be better prepared to handle the quarterly on annual activities.

Incentivized

• Develop API's that are vendor agnostic rather than selecting specific vendors (Clearinghouse, ImageNow).
• Colleague tends to be to reactionary to the changing needs in higher education rather than developing the future.
• Hound clients to pay extra for consulting (consultants are usually bad), rather than helping institutions to use the product. Seems to be the first thing help line personnel jump to rather than working with clients to figure out creative solutions.

Incentivized

• We have issues with students using Time & Labor for multiple jobs, where time is incorrectly calculated, including negative balances where none exist.
• The application is complex and some areas, especially Time & Labor, are very difficult to troubleshoot. The overall level of complexity has increased over the years.
• We also use Campus Solutions and had to split apart HCM and CS, significantly increasing our maintenance overhead and creating inter-system issues that aren't always resolvable.
• Campus Solutions has developed a solution for managing preferred names and gender identity that is missing/ incompatible with the HCM product.

Incentivized

PeopleSoft HCM has provided a very flexible platform for our HR needs. The ability to add customizations to handle some of our unique business processes have been critical in the longevity of our PS HCM use. We've been able to handle a wide variety of business processes for multiple subsidiaries due to the ability to customize when needed.

Incentivized

For decades, Ellucian Colleague has served the University as our primary student record-retention CRM. Its functionality has weathered many recent trends in CRM development and continues to produce the needed results for our constituency and the size of our university. We look forward to continuing to utilize Ellucian Colleague in the future.

Incentivized

Oracle HCM has been around for more thab a decade and is a preferred package to use for Human capital management.Ease with which upgrades happen and how updates are pushed has come thru a long way of improvement and research over the years.Oracle has moved toward cloud based architecture which will help in its customers keep at par with current industry trends.

Incentivized

I give this rating because we have had no issues in the area of the product's overall availability. In my opinion the resources are there when we need them and the features serve the purpose they are set to do. I feel things have gone really well as far as the availability of the product.

Incentivized

This is highly dependent on the server setup you implement. You need to make sure you've included enough hardware to support your users. Not enough power will quickly rear its ugly head. If you've got the correct setup, the product will operate quickly and provide a good user experience. Oracle is slowed down by certain realtime interfaces to other systems, but this can be addressed by your technical team relatively easily.

Incentivized

Overall support has been positive and Oracle has gladly sent out representatives to meet with our teams in person. Despite sometimes sow and inadequate fixes, their willingness to try and meet face to face helps give them a better name in our organization. Sometimes their people do not understand unique needs of the industry, and it can be a challenge to explain that one size does not fit all. Finding the appropriate IT support for our unique requests has been hit and miss.

Incentivized

In my opinion, training in Oracle PeopleSoft HCM is arduous at best. In my experience, there are numerous issues with creating training environments and that makes practice in a sandbox costly. I prefer asynchronous simulated environment training for this reason, but that costs even more due to the development and testing time needed to create that training. eLearning is always there with only the need to keep it up-to-date.

Incentivized

It was a great training tool and provided all of the necessary information we needed to implement the sites for our clients. We were provided with a great deal of resources in regards to Oracle CRM. We didn't have any issues with the training at all. The only thing I would say would that there could be more FAQ's for users to read through

Incentivized

When we implement Oracle and Taleo to different clients it typically goes pretty smoothly. When we do system upgrades we usually test the main issues the clients are having just to make sure there are not outstanding issues or errors. I don't have any examples where implementation went poorly. It typically goes well and clients are pleased with the final result. The only complaint would be the time it takes to implement

Incentivized

I did not use Jenzabar as extensively as Colleague, but they perform similar functions for student information tracking. I think Colleague is more appropriate for use across campus, as its student billing and scheduling options exceed Jenzabar. Jenzabar, however, offers better tools for use exclusively in student affairs. If an organization wants to track all student data, they should consider Colleague.

Incentivized

Oracle PeopleSoft HCM is not as good as SuccessFactors HCM. The look and feel of Oracle PeopleSoft HCM is still 'old school'. Cloud solutions can do more. SuccessFactors offers a great talent management, performance measurement, and employee development, while Oracle PeopleSoft HCM's core is employee records, benefits, and payroll.

Incentivized

In my opinion I rate this high because we have had no issues in this area and so that is why I give it such a high rating. There is no issue with the product's overall scalability. In my opinion this has been a positive from my team and client's view.

Incentivized

• By keeping student's academic work, financial aid, and accounts receivable information in one location we are able to report without the need for data aggregation.
• Colleague's web applications allow the students themselves to perform tasks such as enrollment without assistance from staff members.
• Using customized rules that we can set up in Colleague we can trigger events to happen as data is entered. This eliminates the need not only for someone to remember to perform an additional task, but it also saves the time of performing the actual task.

Incentivized

• As a long time PeopleSoft user, my institution has found great advantages of being involved in the HCM realm such as first-hand information, a complete suite of solutions as well as regular updates to stay up with federal and state regulations.
• Ease of use of development, customization, maintenance and usage perspectives can lead to a better management of financial resources, that minimizes expenditure while providing all necessary resources.
• Opportunities to provide better customer service and meet organizational policies have to lead to a positive outlook on the tool and its features.

Incentivized