Details of GV’s Banner to Workday shift

Grand Valley State University is shifting the current digital financial workspace from the current application Banner to a new application called Workday. The shift to Workday will primarily impact faculty, student employees and financial administration within GVSU.

Banner, the university’s current Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) platform, is “no longer functionally fulfilling the university’s needs.” According to an exclusive interview with Associate Vice President for Business and Finance Craig Wieschhorster, portions of Banner were not optimized for business operations, finance and human resources needs causing several add-on systems to join the “technology stack” at GVSU.

“Banner was not meeting the needs of the University with shortcomings in usability and critical system functionality, insufficient reporting tools and resource-intensive maintenance,” Wieschhorster said. “Workday will consolidate a number of systems in one platform for a more efficient user experience.”

Once the university officially moves forward with the “Human Capital Management Portion” of the Workday platform, Banner Finance will be obsolete. The full shift is expected to take place in January 2024.

Wieschhorster says the university plans to eventually move away from using Banner sources entirely. Though the current shift is only focusing on the financial uses of the Banner system, GVSU is expecting a complete transition from Banner into Workday.

“Banner, over time, will ultimately be phased out completely,” Wieschhorster said. “Workday will ultimately replace all of Banner and a number of other ancillary systems that will now be housed on the Workday platform, e.g., UltraTime, OnBase, Performance evaluations, Concur etc.  Transitioning the Banner Student interface to Workday Student will be commencing soon and ‘Workday Student’ is expected to go live in 2027.”

In the meantime, several budget operations have been suspended in the interim period. Wieschhorster said there are a number of activities minimized in order to keep the data that is housed in Banner stabilized as that data is fed into Workday.

To understand more about the ways Workday will be used for GVSU, visit Workday Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) on the Grand Valley State University website. Any new transactions/expenses after Dec. 6 will be held and submitted in Workday after the go-live.