Accelerating Growth
Award-winning PeopleSoft Financials
solution fuels UCF research growth
By Christyn Smith
When the research foundation at the nation’s second
largest university committed to ambitious growth in
research funding as a strategic goal, it assembled
an award-winning project team to replace its legacy
accounting system with Oracle PeopleSoft Financials,
Supply Chain Management, and Enterprise Services
Automation products.
UCF has few peers in terms of growth rate, increasing in size and
prominence from its origin as Florida Technological University, which
enrolled 1,948 students in its inaugural class in 1963, to the nation’s second
largest university, today serving over 63,000 students on 10 regional campuses spread
across central Florida. In fiscal year 2016, UCF received an all-time-high $145.75 million in
funded research, a 9.3 percent increase over the previous year and a new organizational
record for federal funding. Even for an institution accustomed to rapid growth, a publicly
announced goal of doubling the amount of funded research created an urgent need for
the UCF Research Foundation (UCFRF) to reassess its infrastructure and service levels
in anticipation of reaching that goal. UCFRF recognized that it needed to scale up its
accounting software to meet the challenges of managing that kind of growth.
UCFRF serves the university as a direct-support organization with a vision of delivering
excellence in research support by assisting faculty in clearing through the administrative
landscape to provide an open road for research and innovation. Charged with
strengthening its resources to handle additional millions in research funding, UCFRF
began evaluating software solutions. Oracle PeopleSoft quickly emerged as a favorite.
After evaluating and eliminating alternative solutions, in November 2014 UCFRF
partnered with an established team of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) information
technology (IT) professionals at the university’s Finance and Accounting department
to implement Oracle PeopleSoft Financials. The existing Financials Support Services
(FSS) team, headed by Director of Information Technology Financials Systems Rebecca
Vilsack, was comprised of functional business analysts, application systems programming
managers and leads, and training and communications specialists.
The seven-month collaboration implemented the following suite of PeopleSoft Financials,
Supply Chain (FSCM), and Enterprise Services Automation (ESA) modules for UCFRF:
• Accounts Payable
• Accounts Receivable
• Billing
• Contracts
• General Ledger
• Procurement Card (PCard)
• Project Costing
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Q&A • Issue 4 • 2016