Securing higher education’s future.
A strategic roadmap with Oracle PeopleSoft and TCS.
Industry
Education
Digitizing education for blended and immersive learning experiences
Highlights
- With the advancements in technology, institutions face a constant pressure to balance innovation, user experience and operational stability.
- Integrating AI with PeopleSoft empowers higher education institutions to move beyond potential into performance, enabling user experience improvements, operational continuity and competitive advantage.
- The imperative is to lead smarter, scale responsibly, and innovate without disruption. It’s time to leverage AI and transform how decisions are made, and operations are optimized.
In this article
Overview
Higher education is at a pivotal technological crossroads. Leadership must balance continuous innovation with operational stability, while also managing persistent budget pressures, evolving student expectations, and complex regulatory demands.
Higher education institutions operate in complex technological environments. Evolving demands challenge traditional system management. Persistent budget constraints force IT leaders to maximize existing investments while planning for future needs. Meanwhile, students expect digital-first services and seamless interactions. Post-pandemic digitization exposed both the benefits of modern solutions and the weaknesses of outdated systems, leaving institutions torn between maintaining legacy platforms or undertaking costly, disruptive migrations that risk homogenization and misalignment with their mission. At the same time, rising regulatory and compliance demands add further complexity to already difficult technological decisions.
Oracle’s ten-year rolling support commitment for PeopleSoft provides a rare opportunity for institutions to modernize on their own terms, without the disruption of forced migration. This stability enables deliberate and long-term IT planning. This phased approach with expert partners like TCS and our PeopleSoft Center of Excellence (CoE) offers a cost-effective alternative to expensive "rip and replace" strategies.
This evolution strategy focuses on building from a proven foundation. Institutions can leverage PeopleSoft’s modern Fluid UI, process automation, AI-driven insights, and robust integrations, all enhanced through TCS’s PeopleSoft Center of Excellence and AI WisdomNext™ platform, to create a smarter, more connected campus ecosystem. It accelerates digital transformation, enhances student success through personalized engagement, and drives operational efficiency by automating informed, data-driven decisions.
TCS Solution
The integration pathway to Oracle Fusion Cloud Student enables institutions to preserve their current investments while adopting selective cloud-based capabilities.
This leverages continuous innovation within PeopleSoft, including modern PeopleSoft Fluid UI interfaces, advanced search capabilities, robust process automation, AI, and ML functionalities leveraging TCS WisdomNextTM, a generative AI orchestration platform.
PeopleSoft Fluid UI is a responsive, mobile-optimized interface that reduces the need for separate mobile apps, enabling consistent functionality and reducing development and maintenance costs.
The updated PeopleSoft Campus Solutions 9.2 continues to serve as a proven backbone for higher education, efficiently managing the complexities of end-to-end student lifecycle management.
Integrating AI with PeopleSoft empowers higher education institutions to move beyond potential into performance. It accelerates digital transformation, enhances student success through personalized engagement, and drives operational efficiency by automating informed, data-driven decisions. This is where TCS AI WisdomNextTM for Higher Education is leveraged.
TCS AI WisdomNext™ for Higher Education is a platform that aggregates multiple GenAI services into a single interface and enables organizations to rapidly adopt next-gen technologies at scale, lower costs and address regulatory frameworks. It provides higher education institutions with tools to utilize AI and GenAI for improved student engagement, personalized learning, and operational efficiency. Some potential applications are:
- Student lifecycle management: Digitize the student journey from admissions to alumni engagement, improving efficiency and user experience
- Personalized learning and adaptive pathways: Analyze student data to provide tailored recommendations and real-time feedback.
- Enhanced teaching efficiency: Automate manual tasks for educators, enabling more time for personalized instruction and student interaction. It also supports AI-powered one-on-one tutoring
- Data-driven decision-making: Help in curriculum development, resource allocation, and identifying learning gaps
It provides Intelligent tutoring systems, AI-Driven virtual and augmented reality to create immersive learning experiences, facilitate AI-based assessments to elevate student abilities, streamline administrative processes, and has built-in AI framework to foster AI literacy in education.
The recommended solution is a phased modernization strategy beginning with user experience improvements, progressing to automation, and integrating advanced AI and analytics. It builds upon existing PeopleSoft investments, offering a cost-effective alternative to a full system replacement. This approach leverages continuous innovation within PeopleSoft, with the support of expert partners like TCS. The strategy unfolds in three main phases:
- Phase 1: User experience improvements with PeopleSoft Fluid UI, which provides a responsive, mobile-optimized design, enhancing user experience and delivering immediate and tangible benefits to students and staff.
- Phase 2: Process automation opportunities that help reduce administrative burdens while improving operational efficiency and enhancing service quality.
- Later Phases: Advanced analytics and AI integration are best positioned to benefit as these capabilities require strong data quality, standardized processes, and analytical expertise to ensure effective decision-making.
TCS AI WisdomNextTM leverages the power of GenAI and other advanced technologies to transform operations and enhance the learning experience. Its predictive analytics capabilities leverage ML for proactive Insights, and support with student retention strategies, targeted academic support interventions, and optimized resource allocation decisions. Intelligent workflows learn from user behavior patterns, suggest process improvements, automatically route transactions to appropriate reviewers, and flag potential issues before they escalate. The result is increased operational efficiency combined with enhanced service quality.
Value-driven capabilities
TCS's specialized expertise in higher education technology, supported by its PeopleSoft Center of Excellence, gives institutions proven methods to manage complex modernization projects.
Some key capabilities are mentioned below:
TCS’s dedicated Center of Excellence for Oracle PeopleSoft services provides implementation and support services for PeopleSoft modules, including human capital management, finance and campus solutions, including student financials, directly addressing the core needs of higher education institutions.
- Matured PeopleSoft Academy that conducts regular and periodic functional and technical training programs for consultants on People Tools and PeopleSoft applications.
- Laboratory environment for continuous learning enables TCS to acquire knowledge on new features and functionalities delivered in different PUM versions and PeopleTools releases. It is ideal for conducting various technical and functional training sessions, providing product features’ demos, and facilitating hands-on lab exercises and assessments.
- This also serves as a centralized knowledge hub which enables institutional knowledge to be preserved and leveraged across engagements. Extensive network of over 1,250 consultants provides institutions with access to deep expertise across all aspects of PeopleSoft implementation and support, offering comprehensive coverage of technical and business requirements.
- New capabilities offering: Here, new functionalities released are suggested and implemented for clients.
Competitive advantages
This phased modernization approach delivers incremental value and fosters essential internal capabilities.
Rather than discarding valuable technology assets, institutions can systematically enhance their PeopleSoft environments while maintaining operational continuity and competitive advantage. Institutions can achieve cost-effective modernization, operational stability and continuity, enhanced user experience and engagement and increased efficiency and innovation.
Key benefits are:
- Achieve institutional stability and flexibility with seamless migration, efficient budget planning while preserving existing unique institution workflows and customizations.
- Enhance student and staff experience with mobile-ready “digital-first” interfaces, personalized learning, and automated processes with real-time access.
- Increase operational efficiency and cost savings by leveraging AI and GenAI, while avoiding hidden cloud migration costs.
- Prepare for the future with ready-to-deploy, industry specific solution blueprints for accelerated AI adoption.
- Make smarter decisions with AI-powered analytics and actionable insights.
TCS differentiators
By partnering with TCS, institutions gain a strategic partner capable of delivering modernization with minimal disruption and maximum long-term value.
- TCS PeopleSoft practice team offers tailored solutions that focus specifically on HCM, financials and supply chain management (FSCM), enterprise learning management (ELM), and customer relationship management (CRM) for the unique requirements of higher education institutions.
- TCS is a leader in PeopleSoft-managed services, offers comprehensive technical and functional support for PeopleSoft ERP applications with a customer-centric approach.
- TCS' PeopleSoft CoE combines domain expertise, process redesign capabilities, and seamless integration of PeopleSoft with other enterprise systems to create technological strategies that effectively address both immediate needs and long-term goals.
- TCS’ commitment to constant innovation, demonstrated through investment in RPA capabilities, AI-powered bots, and ongoing training programs, enables partner institutions to benefit from the latest technological advances.
For today’s CIOs, provosts and business officers, the imperative is to lead smarter, scale responsibly, and innovate without disruption. TCS helps realize this vision by ensuring clients and institutions receive top-tier managed services by leveraging extensive domain expertise, deep technical knowledge, robust partner ecosystem, and tailored industry solutions powered by committed investments towards innovation.
Note: "This offering page is written by TCS, not Oracle"