RMIT leaps into 'largest transformation' project

RMIT University is set to move to a cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) system under what is being billed as its “largest transformation project”.

RMIT pitches Workday as solving headaches for accessing core services.

The Melbourne-based university will deploy a Workday ERP platform to act as “a single, simple, secure and smart platform for all of RMIT’s HR, finance and student information functions”, it said last week.

The program of work is running under the codename ‘Project Pi’, and the university has spent the past few weeks recruiting for several work streams, including the procurement stream, which opened to applications last week.

“Project Pi aims to simplify and standardise how our staff and students interact with RMIT every single day,” the university said.

“We want to use real-time data in a smarter way so our staff, research partners, industry partners and our students have access to quality information anytime.

“We hope to provide a service experience that will enable our students to log-on, enrol, change course details and engage with us in a way that suits their lifestyle.”

RMIT said that it hoped to make “all day-to-day university interactions seamless” and to provide staff with information to help them “better support, create and deliver transformative education programs”.

In an unlisted YouTube video, RMIT called out current challenges for staff to locate the part of the university responsible for functions such as changing personal details or viewing payslips.

“With hundreds of systems, endless request forms, and inefficient, time-consuming paper processes, it can be hard, not to mention ineffective,” it said in the video.

“This is where Workday comes in.

“The Workday platform will make it easy to change personal information, check your benefits, request time off, onboard new staff, submit expenses and generate reports. Plus, you can easily navigate RMIT’s organisational chart.”

RMIT suggested it had chosen Workday as its platform in part because the user interface “looks and works just like your favourite website”.

“We’ll be joining millions of people around the world who are using this next generation of enterprise software,” RMIT said.