5 Ways to Evaluate and Improve Your Business Processes Before Moving to SaaS
Original Post | Step 1 | Step 2 | Step 3 | Step 4
In this series, we’ve walked through documenting your PeopleSoft environment, assessing customizations, cleaning your data, and modernizing integrations. Now we move to Step 5 of “10 Steps to Get Your PeopleSoft System Ready to Move to a SaaS Solution,” a step that has nothing to do with code or tools, but everything to do with how your organization actually works.
Evaluate your business processes.
And not just evaluate them; challenge them.
A SaaS transition is more than a technology shift. It’s a chance to rethink the approvals, handoffs, exceptions, and workarounds your teams have built over years of using PeopleSoft. Many of these processes were designed around constraints that no longer exist. Others were built around policy, not necessity. Before you move to SaaS or even a hybrid option, it’s the perfect time to clean them up.
Here are five practical ways to do that.
1. Map Out Current Processes Without Defending Them
Start by capturing your real processes, not the idealized version in the procedure manual. Sit with business users and watch how work actually happens: which screens they use, what spreadsheets they maintain, what emails they rely on, and where they run into friction. Don’t justify anything. Don’t fix anything. Just observe.
Your goal is clarity, not defense. Once you see the whole picture, you’ll spot inefficiencies immediately.
2. Identify Approvals That No Longer Add Value
PeopleSoft has conditioned organizations to add approvals everywhere. Over time, this creates slow, bureaucratic workflows that drain productivity. Review each approval step and ask:
Does this add risk protection or just delay things?
Is the approver actually reviewing anything?
Would a lower threshold or automated rule work instead?
Most SaaS platforms encourage leaner workflows, and this is your chance to reduce the noise before you migrate.
3. Automate Manual Work That Created Shadow Systems
When PeopleSoft couldn’t handle certain tasks, teams built creative workarounds. These may have included spreadsheets, Access databases, emailed reports, manual calculations, paper routing, and one-off tools. SaaS migration is your chance to retire those.
Look for processes like:
Manual reconciliations
Data re-entry across systems
Repetitive validations
Batch jobs triggered by humans
Any manual repeated task can likely be automated or redesigned in a future SaaS environment.
4. Align Processes With Industry Best Practices
PeopleSoft’s flexibility often leads organizations to drift far from the standard way of doing things. While that can be powerful, it also makes SaaS migration harder. Review how similar institutions or organizations manage HR, Finance, and Student processes today.
Best practices aren’t about losing your identity; they’re about reducing friction so SaaS works with you, not against you.
5. Prioritize Simplicity Over Historical Preference
Many existing processes aren’t driven by policy or regulation; they’re driven by institutional memory.
“We’ve always done it this way” is not a strategy.
Evaluate each process step and ask:
Is this still required?
Could SaaS handle this differently?
Does this add value or just consistency with the past?
Your goal is to make the future environment simpler than what you have today.
🎯 Why This Matters
SaaS migration isn’t a lift-and-shift of the way things currently run. If you take process complexity with you, you’ll recreate the same problems in a new system. However, now you’ll have far less flexibility. Evaluating your business processes now helps you:
Reduce cost and scope
Shorten implementation timelines
Improve user adoption
Align with delivered SaaS capabilities
Create cleaner, more resilient workflows
This is your moment to rethink how work gets done, not just where it gets done.