The University at Buffalo's Request for Information (RFI) was distributed to three major student systems software vendors, Oracle's PeopleSoft, SAP Campus Management, and SunGard's Banner. The following information was provided by the vendors to UB and gathered from their Web sites. Additional, more detailed information will be provided in the vendor responses to the RFI.

Please note that during the RFI process (until UB has chosen a vendor solution), representatives from the vendors should NOT be speaking with UB students, faculty, and staff. If a vendor representative contacts you, please ask them to contact UB's Project Manager, Kara Saunders by email at kcs23@buffalo.edu or by phone at (716) 645-6003.

After 30 years, Oracle remains the gold standard for database technology and applications in enterprises throughout the world: The company is the world's leading supplier of software for information management, and the world's second largest independent software company. Oracle technology can be found in nearly every industry, and in the data centers of 98 of the Fortune 100 companies. Oracle is the first software company to develop and deploy 100 percent internet-enabled enterprise software across its entire product line: database, business applications, and application development and decision support tools.

Oracle's PeopleSoft (Campus Solutions) is a comprehensive suite of software specifically designed for the changing needs of higher education institutions. The Solution helps institutions manage the entire student lifecycle-from recruiting and admissions to student services and alumni relations-in a secure and stable environment. PeopleSoft Campus Solutions drives efficiency and productivity across business processes through features such as alumni and donor management, which gives you the ability to manage relationships with alumni and other donors through online access to a detailed history of their involvement with your institution.

• Configure solutions to meet your institution's specific goals and way of doing business.
• Improve efficiency throughout all your administrative processes.
• Lower costs and free resources for more profitable activities.
• Build stronger relationships with all of your constituents.

PeopleSoft includes the following components:

• Campus Community provides a common source of campus data, coordinating all forms of communication to help you manage your administrative services. It captures all prospect, applicant, student, alumni, and organizational data, then secures it, tracks it, and delivers what you need upon request.
• Academic Advisement gives students and faculty timely access to academic records and reports. With less time spent on administrative tasks and information gathering, advisers have more time to interact with students in meaningful ways.
• Financial Aid automates federal and institutional financial aid processing to ensure more efficient operations. Department of Education regulations are built into the software, so your institution remains in compliance.
• Gradebook integrates with the Student Administration module to help your faculty better manage their learning activities and track student progress-anywhere, anytime. With this learning management solution, instructors can create and maintain their class assignments, calculate grades, and apply assignment and exam criteria, including weights, grading scales, and due dates. Gradebook eliminates the time-consuming process associated with transcribing and recording grades from paper.
• Admissions can administer a variety of admission processes by managing recruiters and tracking prospects and applicants. Colleges and universities are empowered with a variety of self-service tools: allowing students the ability to track application status, accept or decline admission, and pay deposit fees. Delivered Admissions functionality, provides processes enabling institutions to automatically administer the assignment of admissions officers based on institutionally defined criteria. Through the use of delivered communications functionality, specific communications, checklists, and comments can be associated with applications automatically. The ability to set and monitor enrollment targets, track progress toward recruiting efforts, and analyze admissions decision and patterns, is a delivered feature of the Recruiting and Admission component.
• Student Financials is an essential tool for managing student and external organization accounts. You can manage and calculate all student financial information, including tuition, fees, receivables, billing, payment plans, and refunds.
• Student Records helps you manage all aspects of enrollment, including catalog and class schedule maintenance, transfer credits, requisite restrictions, class start and end dates, wait lists, academic programs, transcripts, and analysis.
• Oracle's PeopleSoft CRM for Higher Education provides the tools and technology you need to manage all of the interactions you have with students, alumni, staff, and faculty. This solution helps institutions of higher learning to maximize budgets and develop successful high-value student relationships.

To learn more about Oracle's PeopleSoft, visit the following sites:

Oracle Web site 

Oracle brochure  (1 MB)

PeopleSoft User Group 

In the SAP for Higher Education & Research portfolio, SAP offers the SAP family of business applications to address the key business processes: institutional development, student life-cycle management, academic services and learning, student services, and enterprise management and support. SAP® software is powered by the SAP NetWeaver technology platform, the comprehensive integration and application platform that supports enterprise solutions across heterogeneous systems and organizational boundaries.

SAP supports the most important business processes in any HE&R institution and provides tools to help you understand how these processes work. SAP solutions provide value to higher education and research institutions by:

• Offering flexible, customizable solutions that support many types of institutions, including two- and four-year colleges, universities, research, and educational institutions
• Delivering seamless integration across the campus community to achieve complete coverage of both front- and back-office processes
• Enabling institutions of higher education and research to operate more efficiently, provide services to their constituents, be prepared for new missions, and maximize return on their technology investment
• Providing support for distance learning, including electronic communication between students and professors and online programs of study

SAP Campus Management, part of the SAP for Higher Education & Research set of solutions, is built on the most advanced business application technology. It has been implemented globally and in institutions whose student enrollment ranges in size from a few hundred to tens of thousands of students.

Some of the benefits of this robust solution are:

• Access across multiple channels (by phone, in your offices, and over the Web) for high availability to a broad range of users
• Streamlined processes for student administration and registration, account management and financial aid, academic services, and regulatory reporting, reducing error, costs, and employee frustration
• Efficient handling and reporting of finances, resulting in better forecasting and budgeting
• Simplified records management and student information management, increasing accuracy and transparency
• Relationship management activities that allow successful outreach, recruitment, and fund-raising, giving you a competitive edge because you can track communication and activity across the student life cycle - from prospecting to alumni relations
• The flexibility to support ongoing transformation, growth, and optimization of business processes
• The opportunity to leverage best business practices inspired by the experiences of higher-education and research institutions around the globe

For more information about SAP Campus Management, visit the following sites:

SAP Higher Education Web site 

SAP Brochure  (1 MB)

SAP's Vendor Preview Demonstration at UB (May 2007)

Founded in 1968, SunGard Higher Education is a leading global provider of Unified Digital Campus solutions for institutions of different sizes and levels of complexity. The Company supports more than 1,600 customer institutions worldwide with administrative and academic solutions, portal and community solutions, content management and workflow solutions, information access and integration solutions, and professional services. SunGard Higher Education works collaboratively with customers and partners to provide a Unified Digital Campus. The Unified Digital Campus works through the e-Education Infrastructure, a framework for helping each institution create a Unified Digital Campus that supports its unique mission and objectives. Our leadership is based on effective management practices, high-quality products and services, expert staff, and financial strength. SunGard Higher Education is headquartered in Malvern, Pennsylvania and has approximately 2,500 employees. Our leadership is based on effective management practices, high-quality products and services, expert staff, and financial strength.

SunGard's student information system is Banner, which is currently in version 7.x. Banner Student is a market leader in student information systems. It was built by experts from higher education to meet the specific needs of colleges and universities, fusing administrative and academic functions that make it easy to manage data while giving prospects, learners (both traditional and non-traditional), and faculty secure, 24x7, online access to the information they need. All Banner systems (Student, Financial Aid , Human Resources , Finance , and Advancement ) share a common database, for the most thorough integration available in higher education systems today.

There are forty SUNY institutions that use the Banner Student and Financial Aid solutions as well as other solutions offered by SunGard Higher Education including the Luminis Portal, Enterprise Data Ware house, and Banner Xtender Solutions (Imaging). The SUNY System has a support center for the SUNY Banner clients called the SICAS Center. A founding principle of the SICAS program is that cost-effectiveness accrues from shared software developed to meet universal needs. Instead of individual campuses developing and maintaining software to meet their administrative needs, software is written once either to the BANNER baseline or SICAS applications developed by the SICAS Center.

For more information about Banner, visit the following sites:

SunGard Higher Education site

SICAS Center

SunGard Banner User Group