Erp Sap

Enterprise resource planning systems are most commonly associated with managing the movement of goods around factories and warehouses, but they are now increasingly becoming a fixture in the ivory towers of colleges and universities.

In an age when universities face funding cutbacks, increasing competition from technical institutes and a heavier reliance on technology, it is perhaps not surprising that ERP business process is becoming important on campus.

University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, is a perfect example. Throughout the mid-1990s, the university saw a number of provincial government funding cuts that sliced almost 20 per cent from its annual operating grant. Yet it still enjoyed a total income of more than C$600m for an academic year and has undertaken several new programmes to reduce costs and boost income.

The university has, for example, aggressively pushed its licensing and royalty revenues from patent applications and spin-off companies to the point where it can claim that only Stanford University in California outpaces the University of Alberta in this regard. This more "corporate" approach to the operation of the university has also extended to its financial, human resource and student administration functions - where it implemented a PeopleSoft ERP business process.

Higher education is now a far more competitive environment - for both government funding and students. This is probably the most ambitious PeopleSoft implementation in the Canadian higher education sector.

A need to address the year 2000 computer problem was part of what drove the university to look at a solution of this size, it was by no means the only factor. The goal is to restructure business processes and implementation information systems that are appropriate to and will advance the agenda of an ambitious and increasingly entrepreneurial university.

Part of the university's goal in implementing this ERP business process was to eliminate massive duplication of information - and make better use of it. Until recently, for example, information in the human resources database was completely separate from the student database. Yet many graduate students, in particular, will quite naturally fall into both databases - and until the arrival of the ERP business process there was no way for information to move easily between the two.

The ERP system had made it much easier to make information available to students over the university network. It serves students in ways that are convenient to them - not the administrators. And it allows to support faculty where they teach and conduct research.

Meanwhile, at the Queensland University of Technology in Australia, an ERP-style enterprise application integration solution from California-based Constellar Corporation is being used. The university is employing this technology to help it to manage the movement of data between widely disparate applications - including student records, human resources, finance, research management, facilities management, and decision support.