Building a Digital Front Door for Student Success

Florida Polytechnic University, the Florida State University system's youngest and only STEM-dedicated institution, serves a dynamic community of close to 2,000 students in Lakeland, Florida. Founded in 2012 with the mission to prepare a next generation of innovators, the university offers a wide range of programs that drive Florida's economy and support high-skill workforce needs.

Florida Poly's early technology environment helped it grow rapidly upon its opening. But as operations expanded, that environment became harder to sustain. Students were required to move across separate logins, third-party tools, emails, and websites to complete routine tasks. Staff relied on workarounds and customizations that required IT time and limited scale.

"By 2022, the challenges were clear," said Dr. Cole Allen, Vice President and Chief Information Officer at Florida Poly. "Our technology environment had become fragmented, our processes were inconsistent, and staff were spending too much time maintaining systems rather than improving them."

The university recognized its core systems needed to be updated to reflect how modern students navigate academic and campus life. Listening sessions, surveys, hallway conversations, and student participation helped evolve the effort from a system replacement to a student-centered transformation.

"Our campus culture is built around innovation, problem-solving, and collaboration," Allen said. "Students emphasized the need for simplicity, visibility, and one place to access everything."

Streamlining IT Infrastructure

To foster a more integrated digital ecosystem, Florida Poly chose to migrate its legacy student information system to Ellucian Student powered by Banner. The move to Ellucian Student replaced a highly customized legacy environment with the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) foundation of the Ellucian Platform, designed for standardized processes, stronger governance, and long-term scalability.

"SaaS offered a modern, scalable path forward with standardized processes, reduced reliance on customizations, and a unified ecosystem that could support our rapid growth," Allen said.

Ellucian's central workspace capability quickly became the visible front door to the university's broader transformation. Branded as MyFloridaPoly, it brought registration, financial aid, class schedules, events, advising, accessibility services, dining, campus life resources, forms, maps, and course assignments into a single hub. Low-code integration capabilities helped connect a wide range of tools and services without recreating dependencies on custom development.

"Functional users were trained to create and manage their own cards, content, and workflows, which shifted ownership to the people closest to the work," Allen said. "This reduced IT bottlenecks and allowed departments to update information quickly and accurately."

Simplifying Student Services

The deployment of Ellucian Student transformed how students experience Florida Poly's digital campus. Instead of searching through emails, websites, and disconnected systems, students can begin in MyFloridaPoly and move directly to the tools and services they need. The improvement is especially valuable for mobile and commuter students, who rely on fast, consistent access to schedules, assignments, forms, dining information, events, clubs, intramurals, and support services.

The changeover is already providing real value on campus. Login barriers decreased by 85%, mobile usage increased by 70%, and student satisfaction across integrated platforms reached 92%. Registration preparation, which previously required students to gather information from multiple places, now takes about five minutes. Students also report saving 30 minutes to two hours each week because assignments, forms, maps, events, and other resources are centralized.

"Navigation is simpler, tasks are easier to complete, and students report greater confidence in managing their academic journey," Allen said.

Many students describe the shift simply as "seven clicks became one," according to Allen. The new platform has even opened pathways for more students to connect to activities and events on Florida Poly's physical campus.

"Students who previously had little visibility into campus life now open the portal and immediately see opportunities to get involved," Allen said. "One student shared that they used to spend most evenings alone in their dorm, unaware that anything was happening on campus. After using the portal, they discovered five events in a single night and described it as the first time campus life felt visible and accessible."

Transforming University Operations

Operationally, the migration to Ellucian Student also helped Florida Poly reduce the complexity that had accumulated around legacy processes. The university retired more than 100 customizations during implementation, reducing integrations by 55% and reducing custom reports by 44% thanks to new baseline capabilities. Substantial time savings have also been reported across campus.

"The [degree auditing] scribing automation tool eliminated eight weeks of billing hours, and leveraging Ellucian partners saved an additional five weeks of work," Allen said. "Financial Aid processes that previously required approximately 24 work hours were completed in about 20 minutes, demonstrating nearly 99% faster processing and freeing staff capacity for higher-value student support."

Instead of continuing to absorb the cost, risk, and staff burden of maintaining on-premises infrastructure, Florida Poly gained a cloud-based model that reduced infrastructure and licensing costs by 40% and created more than 60% in soft cost savings through reclaimed staff time. The result is not only a cleaner system landscape but also a campus operating model better aligned with student support.

"These gains allow the university to reinvest in student support, training, and emerging technologies that improve daily experiences across the campus community," Allen said. "The reliability gains achieved through the SaaS model also reduce operational risk and create a more stable, predictable technology environment for years to come."

A Foundation for Continuous Innovation

As Florida Poly looks ahead, Ellucian's SaaS Platform provides the university with a stable foundation for continuous innovation. That includes the strategic rollout of more artificial intelligence tools to support the student journey, such as AI-driven analytics to support early identification of student academic needs and an AI-powered central workspace card that offers conversational support for common questions.

With Ellucian as a supporting partner, Florida Poly's technology roadmap remains centered on listening to students, simplifying the campus experience, reducing operational friction, and building technology that can grow with the institution.

"This implementation addressed the core challenges of fragmentation, inconsistent access, and lack of visibility," Allen said. "Most importantly, students describe feeling more connected to campus."