University of San Diego

Salaries account for more than two-thirds of USD’s expenses. Getting accurate, position-level budget data meant manually pulling thousands of rows out of spreadsheets and reconciling them against actual figures in Workday. It was slow, error-prone, and left leadership without the visibility they needed.

USD had moved to Oracle’s cloud-based EPM platform in 2018, but staffing and budgeting issues kept the university from using most of its capabilities. It was essentially just storing budget data and passing it to Workday. There was no connection between what was budgeted and what was actually being spent.

“There was no connection between someone’s actual salary and what was budgeted. Are they over budget? Where do we have vacant positions? Do we have budget resources not being utilized because they’re in the wrong position in the budgets? It was hard to answer questions like that,” says Marie Davis, USD’s Assistant Vice President for Budget and Planning.

Quarterly board reports required pulling data apart and reassembling it by hand. Monthly forecasting took two full days. Reports that leadership needed could take a week to produce.

Mythics connected Oracle EPM to Workday’s SaaS platform, enabling the two cloud systems to communicate. Because Workday updates several times a day, budget reports can now be refreshed with current data whenever needed.

Mythics also applied its Staff Analysis Framework, which links individual salaries to budgeted positions and enables the university to model the impact of staffing scenarios. How does the budget change if a position stays open for three months? What about nine? USD could now answer those questions without a spreadsheet.

“They really understood our position-level budget and staff-management issues,” said Davis.

Services provided:

• Oracle EPM Cloud Integration with Workday
• Mythics Staff Analysis Framework Implementation
• Position-Level Budget and Forecasting Configuration
• Cloud-to-Cloud Connectivity and Go-Live Support

• Monthly budget reports dropped from two days to two hours
• Weekly reports are now delivered in less than a day
• Budget administrators can get into the system and manage their own budgets directly, freeing Davis’s team for higher-level work
• The first pay-review cycle went through successfully, allowing administrators to realign budgets to match salaries with available funding
• Leadership now has real-time visibility into discretionary expenses, financial aid, and federal work-study funding

“Everything we built in EPM is functioning exactly as I thought it would,” said Davis.