35-Year Partnership Drives Growth and Innovation

Three Decades of Growth, Innovation, and Partnership

Over the last 35 years, Oral Roberts University and Ellucian have conquered each new technological advancement together. Today, that partnership continues to flourish with the institution's SaaS modernization project and the rapidly expanding adoption of artificial intelligence.

Located in Tulsa, Oklahoma, ORU serves more than 7,500 students across traditional, online, and hybrid programs. Celebrating 17 consecutive years of enrollment growth, the university has an ambitious goal to reach 10,000 students in the next few years by continuing to deliver a personalized, modern experience.

Understanding that today's students expect the same intuitive technology they encounter in every other part of their lives, ORU leadership knew outdated processes could quickly become barriers to enrollment and student success.

"When students visit a campus and they can't do things on their mobile phones and smart watches, it's not much of a smart experience," said Michael Mathews, Vice President for Global Learning and Innovation at ORU. "We've got to be clear leaders in this area to continue enrollment growth and stay competitive."

Transforming Together as a Unified Campus

ORU selected Ellucian Student to modernize their campus with a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) foundation, enabling the university to accelerate student tasks, improve administrative processes, and prepare for continuous innovation.

"With this modernization project, we're really looking to enhance the efficiency, security, and accessibility of our systems," said Terry Kollmorgen, General Counsel and Chair of the modernization project at ORU. "We said let's embrace this challenge, because if we pull back or resist, it's only going to be more difficult. And to the credit of our people, they have embraced it exceedingly well."

Change management and proactive communication remained central from the start. The project included a task force of department leaders from across campus and 18 modernization champions from those departments to build a feedback bridge between the project team and the functional users.

"SaaS modernization is not an IT project," Mathews said. "The IT is already running. It was running within three weeks. The truth is, it's really the business processes and getting people to understand and adopt."

Together, the task force identified five major objectives for the project: Enhance security and disaster recovery, improve business processes, strengthen data utilization and collaboration, establish ORU as a leader in educational technology, and bolster student engagement and satisfaction.

Students as the North Star

Throughout the modernization effort, one objective stood out as the guiding principle: Improve the student experience.

"One of the things the president said to us with respect to a governing principle was he wants this project to look at every decision and ask what's best for the student," Kollmorgen said.

The team began benchmarking against the best student enrollment processes in higher education to uncover opportunities for improvement, such as minimizing keystrokes and clicks, reducing repetitive data entry and making the experience aesthetically appealing.

Capabilities delivered through the Ellucian Platform, including business process automation and a mobile, customizable central workspace called MyORU, allowed ORU to turn these benchmarks into reality.

Using business process automation within student forms, for example, staff can reuse data and reduce the number of times a student is asked to enter it. Meanwhile, the student's new central workspace makes it easy to access these forms, even on the go.

"We've never had a mobile app for Banner," Kollmorgen said. "Now on a smartphone and smartwatch we'll be able to do that. It's going to be a game changer for our students."

Moving to a modernized central workspace not only unlocked mobile access, but it also gave students faster, more direct pathways to their most common tasks. The sleek new visual entryway eliminates clicks and accelerates process completion, even for complex processes like registration. One experiment showed a 70% reduction in registration completion time with SaaS capabilities.

"We had one of our student workers register for three classes, both in the old on-prem system and in the new SaaS system, and it went from 10 minutes to three minutes," Mathews said. "That doesn't sound like a big deal, but it becomes a big deal when you do the math."

Building a Foundation for AI

Improving business processes and efficiency was always one of the main objectives for the modernization project. Leadership believes that leveraging these efficiencies will improve ORU's ability to support students and free up time to focus on supporting innovation.

Staff in Financial Aid proved this to be true, cutting completion time for one key process from six days down to 45 minutes — a significant reduction for staff and students.

"We will no longer have to do financial aid upgrades on a weekend," Mathews said. "The more operational activity that we get automated, the more time we will have to experiment with AI-related activities across the campus."

With a modern SaaS foundation in place, the university is expanding its work around AI governance, institutional innovation, and new approaches to student success. A cross-functional AI task force is in place, and leadership is exploring plans for an AI Institute that will prepare graduates for an AI-enabled workforce.

"We are elated with the SaaS model," Mathews said. "We probably just took a three-to-five-year jump ahead of everybody because we made the decision early. That differentiates ORU and gives us a jump start on innovating with AI."

ORU's long-standing partnership with Ellucian continues to evolve alongside the university's ambitions. What began more than three decades ago as a Student Information System (SIS) partnership has become a strategic relationship supporting modernization, operational transformation, and future innovation.

"I've done nine ERP/SIS transformations in my career and this has been the smoothest," Mathews said. "You start to realize that it's not about the technology. It's about the processes and the people and transforming the right way."