Saint Paul Public Schools (SPPS) is Minnesota’s second-largest school district, educating over 33,000 students across 69 schools.

PeopleSoft – Saint Paul Public Schools partnership

SPPS has been a PeopleSoft customer since 2009, investing in various modules across PeopleSoft HCM and FSCM.

In 2018, they made a strategic decision to move their PeopleSoft applications into Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, upgrade to the latest applications and PeopleTools releases, deploy Fluid, enable search, roll out new features, and eliminate invasive customizations.

Over the course of this impressive transformation initiative, SPPS deployed many capabilities that are available across PeopleSoft apps and tech. Most importantly, they are realizing measurable benefits for their end users and their business.

 

Investment in User Experience

Saint Paul Public Schools uses Fluid across both HCM and FSCM. In FSCM, mobile usage is primarily for approvals and delegations. In HCM, mobile devices are used for fluid time entry, approving time, and benefits open enrollment from the employees.

15% of Saint Paul Public Schools’ traffic is from mobile devices. Over 20% of its external applicants use mobile devices to search and apply for jobs. Classic plus has been enabled for all Classic pages SPPS has created custom navigation collections and homepage tiles for all the business roles and end-user functions.In addition, they used the Approvals Page Composer for approvals for Reported Time, Life Events, Vacation Delegations, and custom forms.

They have deployed Search for navigation and for item search in eProcurement, company directory, job postings, and applicants in HCM. All menu search indexes have real-time indexing enabled, and Configurable search is used now for Job Data in HCM.

 

Eliminating Customizations

As part of their upgrade, SPPS took an “event mapping first” approach to reduce customizations. According to the customer, about 25% of customizations in HCM were replaced or modified to use event mapping.

They took advantage of drop zones in the Recruiting module to gather information without the need to customize and used Page and Field Configurator to eliminate invasive modifications to delivered pages.

 

Selective Adoption and Maintenance Strategy

SPPS used their major upgrade to 9.2 and PeopleTools 8.59 in 2022, as the platform for their Selective Adoption strategy. They began taking all regulatory patches via Selective Adoption as well as key updates for applications. Since then, SPPS has been aggressive in adopting new PeopleTools releases.

In the fall of 2022, SPPS participated in the PeopleTools 8.60 Early Adopter program and went live on 8.60 in March of 2023 – becoming one of the very first customers on PeopleTools 8.60.

 

The transition from On-prem to Cloud

SPPS has used Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) to run PeopleSoft since 2019. Moving their non-production PeopleSoft environments to OCI-Classic allowed them to save money on hardware replacements. In 2020, SPPS moved their non-production and Disaster Recovery (DR) environments to OCI to take advantage of the next-generation cloud. In 2021, SPPS moved its production environments to OCI and added another region for DR in 2022.

 

Automation in the Cloud

Once in OCI, SPPS began using PeopleSoft Cloud Manager to provision and manage some of their demo environments, non-production, and special project environments, including their PeopleTools 8.61 early adopter environments. Cloud Manager is used for automatic PeopleTools upgrades and testing, PUM auto-deployment, IDPK patching, and auto start and shutdown using policies.

 

Benefits of moving to Cloud

Since moving to OCI, SPPS has reduced its infrastructure costs by about 75%, licensing costs went down by 50%, staffing costs by 25%, facility costs by 75% and hardware acquisition costs by 75%. The other reported benefits of moving to OCI included experiencing near-zero system downtime and a significant increase in system performance.

You can learn more about their Cloud journey by watching the customer testimonial video below.

 

Recognition

SPPS has invested in a multi-year transformation that has delivered significant benefits to its users, and its business. Which has also helped reduce the cost of running PeopleSoft.

For these achievements, SPPS was recognized as a Feature Innovator in 2020 and a PeopleSoft Innovator in 2024.