Two years ago, Baylor University announced an ambitious campaign to pursue classification as a Research 1 (R1) institution, placing the Waco, Texas, school among the nation's top research institutions. But the universities' legacy HR and financial systems were cumbersome and hardly up to the task. They had a host of systems that they had bolted on to their core HR architecture that the CHRO likened to "barnacles."

It was clear that these disparate processes and systems couldn't sustain Baylor as it launched into its R1 growth curve. This is where we were able to help, by implementing Oracle Cloud applications to modernize Baylor's HR and finance functions, and put it in a position to scale easily as needs grow.

I've worked in higher education for 20 years-18 of them at a university (Vanderbilt)-and I know that Baylor's challenges are common to many universities aspiring to R1 classification. These operations need more efficient procurement, HR, and payroll enterprises, which all feed into the research enterprise as your sponsored program portfolio grows.

To modernize its systems, Baylor chose Oracle Cloud Human Capital Management (HCM) for its new HR platform and Oracle Cloud Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) for finance.