Deloitte & UC: Navigating the Digital Frontier

Embarking on a comprehensive digital transformation is a monumental task for any enterprise but modernising a 200-year-old higher education institution presents a unique set of challenges.

For the past 18 months, Deloitte has acted as a strategic advisor across the University of Cincinnati (UC)’s entire operational landscape. 

Matt Fiorino, Senior Manager at Deloitte, leads the account, helping the university prepare for, implement and sustain its ERP investments through meticulous readiness and early engagement. 

“The university is a very forward-thinking institution, so they’re starting well before their actual journey launches,” he explains.

“In terms of getting prepared for their ERP transformation and digital journey, we start with establishing a base for their leadership and governance to ensure that we have the appropriate executive stakeholders at the table.”

This has led to several opportunities for collaboration between Deloitte and UC, including reimplementing and optimising UC’s Anapalan planning and budgeting solution, assessing the current HR System to identify technical and operational efficiencies and working with UC on its ERP Futures Program. 

Next, the university will map out its timeline and resource needs. The focus will then shift to evaluating the total cost of ownership across HR, finance and student systems. 

“We will establish a business case for the financial investment to move to a new ERP cloud product,” Matt says. 

The rise of agentic AI on campus

The practical impact of AI on administrative efficiency is reshaping higher education operations and toward targeted, automated workflows that free up valuable human hours.

“Agentic AI creates efficiencies in processes that are very manual work but don’t need to be,” Matt notes.

Software vendors like Oracle and Workday are already looking to embed agentic AI within the university’s systems, automating routine tasks like grant processing and data summaries to free up staff to focus entirely on supporting students and the university. 

The power of a strategic partner

Successful cloud transformation requires more than just a software vendor – it takes a holistic view of the institution. 

Deloitte connects the dots across systems so budgeters can plan for the long term. 

“One individual problem can be solved by one individual answer,” Matt says.

“At Deloitte, we have a unique ability across a large and mature higher education practitioner base to pull in the best experts on any function or product, at any level.

“This allows us to truly understand institutions, especially UC’s pain points, processes and drivers to help best advise across the institution rather than solve the individual problems.”

By breaking down institutional silos, this collaborative approach ensures a clean, single source of truth, allowing complex research universities to make real-time, data-driven decisions long after the initial go-live date.

“A successful cloud platform does three things: modernises the institution, drives continuous technological improvement and – most importantly – uses real-time data and analytics to help administrators and students make better decisions,” Matt says.