Question

Chacon University is a Midwest university with 16,000 students, using various legacy systems for student records, financial systems, human resources, and financial aid. The president of Chacon heard a presentation about ERP systems at a seminar for university administrators. Discuss and summarize the problems with using an ERP system at a university.

Answer 1

ANSWER

There are several areas of potential problems. Those identified or implied are:

d.

Universities have a different environment than corporations. Corporations are managed top-down with the chief executives holding much influence over everything. Universities are much more decentralized and subunits operate with more autonomy.

e.

The IT staff at universities are not usually experienced with ERP systems and tend to rush implementation and not test the systems.

f.

Too many “home-grown” legacy systems that may be difficult to convert into ERP systems. The article does mention that middleware can be used to integrate the legacy systems into an ERP system.

g.

University presidents or administrators may have too high expectations for ERP systems and try to implement too many modules.

h.

The ERP systems costs more to support than the legacy systems.

i.

It is difficult to get “buy-in” from everyone across campus for different processes that match the ERP system. This is difficult in universities because of the autonomy mentioned in (a) above.

j.

Universities have lean staffs and tight budgets which leads to lack of staff training and less testing of the system.

k.

In some cases the load on the system of all the returning students in the fall caused the web portal to crash. (for example at Massachusetts)

l.

ERP vendors, such as PeopleSoft did not have as much experience in University implementations and often were unable to provide answers.

m.

In the Montclair University lawsuit against Oracle, both sides claim the other party is to blame. The project was named the ”Bell Tower Initiative” and it was to take 25 months and cost $15.75 million. Montclair claimed that the Oracle IT staff were subcontractors who were unprepared to conduct the implementation and were constantly rotated on and then off the project. Oracle claimed the university did not have a competent IT staff who understood the technology. The Montclair staff could not properly assist Oracle’s staff.