Project Workday
After a year-long search and evaluation process, Macalester selects Workday Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) platform to replace Banner for Finance, Human Resources, and Student.
What is an ERP?
An Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) platform is the backbone of campus operations, integrating and supporting essential functions such as:
- Budget and financial planning
- Hiring and payroll
- Student records, registration, and advising
- Procurement and purchasing
What is Workday?
Workday is a cloud-based system that brings together Human Capital Management (HCM), Finance, Payroll, and Student information in one easy-to-use platform. It’s designed to simplify everyday tasks and make things more efficient for everyone. With real-time access to key information, faculty, staff, and students will be able to quickly find what they need. Plus, Workday is flexible, so it can grow and change as our needs evolve.
What are the goals of this project?
Modernization: Replace our outdated and unsustainable Banner ERP system with a scalable, cloud-native system that consolidates applications and positions the college to leverage emerging technologies that meet the evolving needs of the campus community.
User Experience: Offer a modern, intuitive interface that improves usability for students, faculty, and staff, making it easier to complete tasks and access information.
Security & Compliance: Enhance data security and ensure compliance with regulatory standards through robust, continuously updated cloud infrastructure.
Operational Efficiency: Streamline and automate processes to reduce administrative burden, eliminate redundancy, and allow faculty and staff to focus more time on mission-critical work.
Data Access and Insights: Provide real-time access to accurate, consistent data that supports decision making, planning, and reporting across the college.
Project Timeline: Human Capital and Finance
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In planning, the team reviews scope, creates timelines, and establishes project tools and processes. Team begins Workday training to build knowledge of the system.
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In this phase we will design and build the future state of the system. This includes configuring business processes, reports, roles, and integrations with other systems.
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In test, we validate the new system against the system design and requirements with involvement from functional teams.
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System is finalized and legacy data is migrated to the new system.
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System is monitored to ensure it works as expected.
Project Timeline: Student
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Workday Student project will begin in summer of 2026. More details to come.
Guiding Principles
These Guiding Principles outline key criteria for making decisions regarding the Workday Deployment Project and are intended to help the project team accomplish its goals in the most timely and cost-effective way while still meeting essential requirements.
1. Student, Faculty, and Staff-Centered Design
We prioritize the end-user experience by designing efficient, intuitive, and accessible processes that reduce administrative burden and support academic and operational success.
2. Standardize Where Possible
We will adopt Workday’s delivered best practices wherever feasible, limiting customizations to legal, regulatory, or mission-critical requirements.
3. Transparency and Communication
We commit to clear, consistent communication throughout the project, encouraging feedback and fostering stakeholder trust.
4. Change Management is Everyone’s Responsibility
We recognize that successful implementation requires active engagement, leadership support, and thoughtful change enablement across all levels.
5. Sustainability and Future Readiness
Together, we make decisions that ensure long-term maintainability, scalability, and adaptability of the Workday system.
Project Governance
The governance framework ensures clear and collaborative decision making as we transition to Workday. This structure is designed to enable quick, insightful project decisions while fostering alignment with institutional priorities, transparency, and effective problem resolution.
Governance groups include:
Steering Group
This group manages cross-departmental impacts and policy-related decisions. It resolves complex issues, facilitates institutional alignment, and ensures project milestones are met. In addition, the Steering Group promotes communication and collaboration between functional areas and provides leadership in the development and execution of the project change management plan.
Membership includes:
- Bethany Miller – Associate Provost & Chief Data Officer (Inst. Research)
- Adam Johnson – Director of Institutional Research (Inst. Research)
- Marga Miller – Assistant Provost (Provost’s Office)
- Claire Sislo – Data and Systems Specialist (Provost’s Office)
- Dave Berglund – Associate VP for Finance (Business Services)
- Aimee Baxter – Business Services Systems Manager (Business Services)
- Deb Ekeren – Director of Human Resources (HR)
- Registrar (Registrar’s Office)
- Matthew Sherman- Associate Registrar (Registrar’s Office)
- Brian Lindeman – Assistant VP of Admissions and Fin Aid (Admissions and Fin Aid)
- Tim Friemann – Database Manager (ITS)
Change Management Team
Successful implementation of Workday requires intention, campus-wide change enablement. It ensures our community is prepared for, informed about, and supported throughout this transformation.
Membership includes:
- Change Management Lead: Jenn Haas, CIO
- Student: Jonathan Cardenas
- Faculty: Kelly MacGregor
- Staff: Kara Zetzman
- Academic Affairs: Claire Sislo
- Business Service Systems: Aimée Baxter
- Communications & Marketing: Michelle Benson
- Change Advisor: Lea Green
Working Groups
Working groups manage daily project tasks, configure processes, represent the needs and perspectives of the campus community regarding processes and systems and make day-to-day project decisions. The working groups are made up of subject matter experts.
Working Groups (membership TBD) are as follows:
- Business Process: Design and test new and adapted business processes (including HR, Business Services, Student, etc.) and ensure solutions meet objectives.
- Integration: Create and confirm integrations scope, obtains approvals for all integration development, testing and deployment activities including third party vendors.
- Data and Reporting: Validate data conversion extract and transformation activities, manage technical reporting activities, develop list of reports for which a Workday standard report does not exist and require custom development using Workday ad-hoc reporting or advanced reporting tools.
Project Management
The Project Managers are responsible for managing the project to completion including user acceptance, managing working groups, removing roadblocks to complete project activities on budget, on time. Set deadlines and evaluate milestones, providing project status updates to Sponsors and Steering Group members on a regular basis and managing the relationship with the implementation partner.
Project Managers:
- Ramón Rentas – Associate VP of Infrastructure and Enterprise (ITS)
- Fabíola Grubhofer – Project Manager/Business Analyst (ITS)