Durham University handles 10-year strategic growth with Oracle EPM Cloud

Durham University implements Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service to forecast and support 10-year institutional strategy.

Durham University is a collegiate university that focuses not only on excellence in teaching and research but also on the wider student experience—spanning volunteering, sports, music, and theatre. The University launched a 10-year strategy aimed at internationalizing the university, recruiting world-class academic staff, significantly increasing student numbers, and investing in new real estate. To meet the demands of major growth in the coming years, Durham University staff within the Strategic Planning and Finance teams needed a powerful collaborative planning and budgeting tool to replace a highly accurate but labor-intensive spreadsheet-based solution.

“In the past, we planned at the program level, but the increased transparency and enhanced analytics of Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud enables us to cascade changes from Department and Faculty to the program level.”
Helen Fawcett, Planning Manager, Strategic Planning Office, Durham University

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Business challenges

Establish a single version of the truth when forecasting student numbers and budgeting the University’s 10-year strategy
Reduce the high degree of manual effort involved in forecasting university student numbers and budgets
Eliminate potential errors and bottlenecks inherent in the current spreadsheet process of planning and budgeting
Enable greater collaboration between strategic planning and finance departments for forecasting and budgeting the University’s 10-year strategy

The Oracle Consulting team working with us on site was fantastic during data loading, programming, and implementation processes over the 12 weeks leading up to go live. With Oracle Consulting, we learned a lot about our systems and processes and increased the cross-working between our strategic planning and finance departments.

Why Durham University Chose Oracle

“We chose Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud partly because we were on Oracle E-Business Suite Financials but also because we did not want to customize—we wanted a standard solution that would allow us to simply input our data rather than making it Durham specific. Oracle could do what we wanted to it to do.”
—Helen Fawcett, Planning Manager, Strategic Planning Office, Durham University

Results

Created a single set of forecasting data for planning and forecasting of student numbers by Strategic Planning, Student Registry, and Finance departments by replacing spreadsheet-based forecasting with Oracle Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) Cloud
Gained the ability to create multiple long-term scenarios for planning academic recruitment and facilities construction over 10 years by tweaking variables such as tuition fee revenue and student load
Instituted accurate financial forecasting for the 10-year strategic plan to increase the student population from 17,500 to 21,500 by 2027, of which 35% are projected to be overseas students—factoring in tuition revenue and staff recruitment targets
Expanded forecasting from 5 years to 10 years with increased granularity for predicting the impact of new academic modules to support student enrollment, staffing, and projected revenue
Adopted out-of-the-box functionality of Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud to generate forecasts automatically, conduct scenario planning, and share data and plans across departments, abandoning legacy processes of customizing solutions

Published:14 November 2018