Streamlining payroll with Oracle Cloud for a growing health network

Client overview

The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio (UTHSA) is a public academic health science center in San Antonio, Texas, and an integral part of the University of Texas System. It serves San Antonio and all 50,000 square miles of Central and South Texas with campuses extending to Laredo and the Lower Rio Grande Valley.

Among its five schools, UTHSA employs a diverse workforce of over 8,000 employees, and is growing quickly. It operates with an annual expense budget of $1.5 billion and a clinical practice that provides nearly 3 million patient visits each year. More than 3,400 students are educated annually across more than 100 affiliated hospitals, clinics and healthcare facilities.

The university offers more than 65 degrees, most of which are graduate and professional degrees in the biomedical and health sciences fields. Most recently in fall 2024, UTHSA opened its Multispecialty and Research Hospital, a cornerstone of advanced care for the region and beyond.

The situation

After a successful Oracle Human Capital Management (HCM) go-live in April 2024, which included the launch of Core HR, HCM Communicate, Guided Learning, Recruiting, Journeys, Benefits, Workforce Compensation, HR Helpdesk, Talent Management, Touchpoints, Learning and Digital Assistant, UTHSA was ready to move into phase 2 and bring payroll into the cloud.

Because payroll continued to run in the legacy PeopleSoft environment after the HCM go-live, the Baker Tilly team implemented a co-exist model to ensure HR transactions affecting payroll were seamlessly integrated. This approach helped ensure payroll remained accurate in PeopleSoft, even though it was no longer the system of record for HR data.

To successfully implement Oracle Payroll, the co-exist model and all integrations with internal and external systems requiring payroll data would need to be addressed.

The solution

UTHSA engaged Baker Tilly to migrate payroll processing from PeopleSoft to Oracle Cloud to support planned growth and future challenges created by the opening of a major hospital and consolidate onto a single HCM system.

Payroll implementation planning began in early 2024, and the “Harmonize phase" of the project, focused on future-state process mapping, technical strategy and inventory analysis, was launched in parallel with the larger Oracle phase 1 HCM rollout in February 2024. After the successful go-live of phase 1 in April 2024, the team began the build and unit test phase for Oracle Payroll.

The midyear payroll go-live required conversion of both calendar year and fiscal year balances from PeopleSoft to Oracle. The team also developed, unit tested and conducted system integration testing for more than 55 integrations to support internal and external systems. No payroll implementation would be complete without a parallel test, and the Baker Tilly team conducted two cycles, comparing full payroll execution between the legacy PeopleSoft system and Oracle, and achieved penny-perfect balance.

The outcome

The Oracle Payroll module was deployed and went live in June 2024. Thanks to thorough and detailed work completed during the implementation phase, the team was able to achieve 100% load success for the conversion objects at go-live.

A custom solution was built to handle taxes for treaty employees, streamlining the process and eliminating much of the manual work previously required in PeopleSoft. Costing is critical at UTHSA, and the team successfully integrated with the financial system to pass accurate costing information and streamline related processes.

The extensive knowledge transfer and the hands-on testing approach used during the implementation phase has enabled the UTHSA team to successfully execute six monthly payroll cycles, twelve biweekly cycles and dozens of off-cycle and supplemental payroll runs since the go-live in mid-June.

Overall, the payroll solution is working very well for UTHSA. Operating within a single HCM system has significantly reduced issues and manual work, allowing the payroll team to focus on value-added activities instead of resolving data issues.

Why Baker Tilly

Baker Tilly and UTHSA had networked for more than 2.5 years prior to this project. In late 2022, the teams collaborated on Baker Tilly’s “Calibration phase” to assist the university in preparing for the kick-off of the phase 1 HCM project.

Following a successful phase 1 launch of HCM, the team was ready for a very successful phase 2 Payroll launch, building on the teamwork and momentum from phase 1. Over the past three years, Baker Tilly and UTHSA have developed a true partnership, and the combined success of the phase 1 HCM go-live and phase 2 Payroll go-live is worth celebrating.

Next, Baker Tilly will facilitate discussions and planning to expand UTHSA’s Oracle Cloud footprint with expansions in enterprise performance management (EPM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP).