Ellucian Banner vs. Oracle PeopleSoft ERP

As a SIS, Banner Pages is the full meal deal. There are multiple modules that integrate out of the box. Because Banner is all I've ever used as a SIS, I can't contrast it with another program. I can say, it gets the job done for us. I will also say that a tremendous amount of time goes into strategizing how to get new functions to work for us and there always seems to be some catch that requires even more work. In general, the university has been hesitant to build too many modifications into Banner because they take a lot of time to maintain. Inevitably, a new update (of which there are MANY for Banner) will break stuff that isn't "vanilla." This is unfortunate because we've had some great ideas for how to make Banner better for us, but also understandable. If you're looking for a highly modular system, this isn't it. Banner has lots of components, but the components work the way they work and that's that. Also, don't expect very quick responses to bugs or glitches. If the bug is major, yes, it will be addressed. But, little function issues seem to be regularly overlooked.

Incentivized

Well suited for established, large organizations with a large user base and the ability to devote significant resources to design and implementation of a vetted, long-term solution for business processing. Not well suited for very small businesses or businesses whose business processes are changing continuously. Changing PeopleSoft for business process changes/modifications requires significant time and resources due to the design, testing, and implementation tasks involved

Incentivized

• I think it's great to use if you are tracking grades for certain classes, especially if you'd like to see how students do, comparing midterm to final grades. If you have the permissions, you can see both.
• It's also good to track students individually. You can look up a certain semester, and see how they did in that particular time frame, but you can also see their cumulative gpa, or even look up their entire course history.

Incentivized

• PeopleSoft has great development tools to help support the application. The application designer is a robust tool that provides the PeopleSoft Developer a powerful user interface to help support the PeopleSoft Financials application.
• PeopleSoft Financials delivers robust financial reporting capabilities. With the use of nVision, queries, BI Publisher, and trees the Finance team can create all their reporting needs in an automated fashion.
• PeopleSoft Financials has streamlined interfaces from the subsystems to the General Ledger. There is drill back capabilities from GL to the various subsystems to perform streamlined account reconciliations.

Incentivized

• One thing I miss from the previous version of Ellucian Banner, is the control + page down. I struggle with alt + page down.
• I love the Ellucian Banner favorites; however, it is a little difficult to navigate.
• I can honestly only think of 2 things that could be improved. I use Ellucian Banner daily.

Incentivized

• Inability to view the results of multiple queries at once in the Query Viewer.
• Although there is excellent integration with Oracle's other products, there is an unacceptable amount of support for other third party vendors.
• Personalization Feature for a Quick-Access Menu. Due to the abundance of features in PeopleSoft SCM, it sometimes takes a while to find that one option as there are so many others in the same menu. It would be nice for a user to be able to drag and drop some options they use frequently into a Quick-Access menu.

We have no reason not to renew with Ellucian - we are in deep with the ecosystem, and have Ellucian providing us with information technology support. If anything, should the opportunity arise, we'd probably consider adding a different ellucian tools into the suite of applications we already have on board.

Incentivized

PRISM is a great tool to track and watch numerous financial documents. I would like to see more of an integration platform that would control tracking for specific project details. There is currently only a little section for job notes which I would like to see improve. I think navigation could be improved, but isn't the worst compared to some platforms I have worked with as it provides a tree like structure on the backend which helps synchronize information together for fiscal financials.

You definitely have to learn it before it becomes easy to use. It's better than it was, but it's still not entirely intuitive. You can't just look at it and play around to figure out how it works

Incentivized

The usability is very outdated In my opinion. The screens resemble those of Windows 3.1. Too many clicks and drop-downs or clicks to go to a new screen. The business logic also appears dated and requires an update. Overall, it does not have a pleasing User Interface and should be refreshed, or a new interface should be built from the ground up.

Incentivized

It's pretty much up all the time.

Incentivized

Has gotten much better due to new hardware.

Incentivized

Our department generally does not contact the support center for Banner but the IT department does. That being said, in the seven years that I have been here, I have not once needed to contact the support center; we have had no glitches on Banner's side that needed to be addressed.

Incentivized

I can't give them a perfect rating because it does often take a long time and usually more [expensive] to resolve trying issues that cannot be solved by our in-house team. PeopleSoft is complicated, and the mix and match of user-created and stock modules cause problems very often. These usually require more customization to completely fix, requiring more money spent with

Incentivized

very satisfied, along with the IT staff and ellucian support the upgrades do very well and have minimum down time.

Incentivized

I recommend that everyone pay special attention to developing a solid testing and training plan if you are even thinking of implementing PeopleSoft. Be ready to obtain good trainers and developers, otherwise, your journey can be unnecessarily painful and much more expensive. Try to stay with an implementation partner who really has your needs at heart, and actually takes the time to understand your organization!

Incentivized

PeopleSoft was more user-friendly. It also provided the ability to save and bookmark queries. PeopleSoft will allow users to use common names to search for queries. Overall, it seemed much more current than Banner. PeopleSoft provided enrollment data for specific sections which allowed one to spot trends of enrollment in a given class.

Incentivized

It is pretty much in line with PeopleSoft Financials because it gives seamless integration between Financials and HCM. Also, when you have both the softwares on same technology, it is very cost effective. One of the reason for selecting PeopleSoft Financials and HCM are their capability to customize the business process. We have gone so far that we have built the bolt-on solutions.

Incentivized

being able to scale with hardware was easy and not cumbersome. We were allowed to user virtual machines which made things very scalable.

Incentivized

• There is positive ROI on the product overall. It had reduced or allowed us to focus our staff members on something which is very use and it does the job in the background.
• The application has supported in a lot of ways in saving resources and utilizing them in very productive & efficient manner

Incentivized

• Positive tracking of ledger information for all areas of the organization. Our organization has multiple business units that require the accurate and complete tracking of transactions and budgetary history going back multiple years, which PeopleSoft Financials has done
• Ability to connect with external vendors easily and to export any and all file types and connect to service operations/web services as well as accept and process transactions from external systems has brought a positive impact
• PeopleSoft provides the framework to reconcile transactions across the organization and within different business units to provide transparency and transactional history for metrics and data analysis

Incentivized