Insights and Tips from the Experts

EPM Planning, formerly known and sold as Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service (PBCS), is a full-featured data input and reporting tool built for annual planning and periodic forecasting.  If you get the enterprise edition, you get access to additional modules that create plan types for workforce planning, capital depreciation planning, and project planning with additional modules available.  This purpose-built tool can be leveraged as is straight out-of-the-box.  The only requirement is a stable, known general ledger chart of accounts with all chart fields and their respective hierarchical structures to be complete and available for uploading into EPM. 

Amidst the challenging and ever-changing global pandemic, some of Highstreet’s Oracle Cloud clients joined Oracle in a panel to discuss how Higher Education institutions innovate through COVID-19 budget cuts. If you missed the live webinar, you can listen to the recording and hear more from the panel’s speakers. These four Higher Education thought leaders; Spring Arbor University’s CIO Randall Melton, the University of Kansas’ CFO Diane Goddard, and Skidmore College’s CTO Dwane Sterling; come together and talk about how they’re innovating through these changing times.

American University of Antigua College of Medicine (AUA) made a decision to bring their financial aid processing in-house, providing efficiencies and cost savings to them in these turbulent times.  That decision required an immediate solution; a solution that couldn’t be put off for an additional financial aid processing cycle.  Moving from a third-party provider of financial aid services to internal resources was a big lift for the institution and required both a solid software solution and an implementation partner with very strong expertise to support able in-house financial aid personnel. 

The Technical College System of Georgia, one of the first College Systems to implement Oracle Student Management Cloud (SMC), has selected Highstreet as their implementation partner for their Oracle SMC project. 

Together, KIPP DC College Preparatory (KCP – a Title I school in Washington DC) and Highstreet (an IT services company in Rockville, Maryland) have launched their first-ever high school Internship program designed by Nick Magliato, Highstreet’s CEO, and KCP’s College & Career Coordinator, Alice Li. This six-week summer internship program for KCP’s students supports KCP’s mission that each of their students will successfully go onto college and a fulfilling career. From idea to launch, the program was up and running in a mere two weeks. We hope this outreach becomes mainstream in the DC business community and beyond. This partnership is the first of its kind for both KCP and Highstreet. Let’s write the next chapter!

As a financial aid administrator, there can be a lot of pressure to assist students while ensuring regulatory compliance is being upheld to protect your institution. Why hasn’t the student received their funds? What paperwork or tasks are remaining? Who needs to complete these action items? Well, for some of these more common questions, Highstreet’s Student Financial Planning team headed by Heidi McLellan, a Principal Cloud consultant, has an Expert Tip for you. Instead of sorting through numerous reports, you can quickly access a student’s Fund Eligibility data and save yourself some time and effort—all of this information can be found on the Fund Eligibility screen. Look below for how to navigate to that screen.