The University of Arizona

Student Administration Overview

What is PeopleSoft Campus Solutions? 

The Student Administration part of the Mosaic Project involves implementing portions of Oracle's PeopleSoft ‘Campus Solutions' software suite. These components include:

?  Campus Community (person- and organization-oriented biographical and demographic data)
?  Academic Structure (the University's academic program inventory and organization)
?  Student Records
?  Admissions
?  Academic Advising (degree audit)
?  Student Financials
?  Financial Aid

PeopleSoft Campus Solutions is a market leader, a mature product used to successfully conduct university business at hundreds of public and private institutions around the world, including both NAU and ASU. There are a large number of very experienced consultants, knowledge experts, and software engineers available to assist schools in implementing the product. In addition, there is a very active user group, the Higher Education User Group, HEUG, which assists universities and Oracle itself in enriching the functionality of current and future releases of the product.

The U of A will fit business processes around the software as much as possible. A project-wide decision-making apparatus has been designed to evaluate requests for customization. The basic theme is to start with the delivered software, and not with existing business processes. An iterative approach has been adopted based on experience with other large scale system implementations. 

  1. The first iteration will be to configure the software and demonstrate the ability to follow a few students through their lifecycle from admissions through graduation. This exercise will transform all of the basic elements of the university's business into the PeopleSoft context.

  2. The second iteration will follow the same lifecycle for a larger and more diverse population of students. This will entail a more robust configuration, and should identify some local business processes that will need to be modified.

  3. The third and all following iterations will continue the process of increased complexity of configuration to accommodate more existing populations.Knowledge of the software will grow through these iterations and judgments about what business process changes are needed will grow along with that.