Sheffield/Stuttgart August 29, 2025 – At the University of Sheffield, a research-intensive institution with more than 35,000 students, the student record system is at the very core of academic operations. For nearly 20 years, this system—built on Oracle Technologies—has been managing the complete student lifecycle: from applications and admissions to progression, graduation, and beyond.
Over time, the system became increasingly complex and outdated, running on legacy Oracle and Forms versions. A period of underinvestment had left the university with an aging infrastructure that was difficult to maintain and limited in its ability to support future innovation.
“A recent addition to how we work has been to use process mining to look at how data and processes flow across the University and between different areas and different staff teams and PITSS.CON has enabled us to just enable a config switch for more logging and then analyse that later, and then see where our processes get stuck, where our data goes, and use that to then redesign those processes to be more efficient.”
Dr. Arthur Clune, CTO at University of Shefffield
A prime example from legacy to modern
Partnering with PITSS, the university leveraged PITSS.CON to accelerate development, simplify upgrades, and better manage the complexity of a technology stack spanning Oracle Forms, Oracle APEX, Java, and PL/SQL. With PITSS.CON, Sheffield could:
- Automate and streamline Oracle Forms upgrades reliably and at scale.
- Transition to AWS Cloud, moving away from aging on-premise hardware.
- Modernize the system with the latest Oracle versions and re-engineered integrations.
- Introduce Oracle APEX side by side with Forms to improve user experience while preserving trusted business logic.
Sustainably modernized and ideally positioned for the future
- Faster, more reliable performance:
Moving to AWS brought significant speed and reliability benefits for end users. - Smarter process insights:
With PITSS.CON, the University of Sheffield introduced process mining, enabling them to track data flows, identify bottlenecks, and detect unused code—leading to more efficient workflows.
Future-proof modernization: By combining Forms with APEX, Sheffield gained a low-risk, incremental upgrade path that modernizes the user interface without losing decades of proven backend logic.
With the system now fully upgraded and running in the cloud, the University of Sheffield is focused on further enhancing the student and staff experience. The roadmap includes rolling out more APEX applications, continuously improving processes, and ensuring the system remains agile and ready for future challenges.
A true example of how legacy modernization, smart tooling, and cloud migration can transform a mission-critical university system into a future-ready platform.
