Selection of ERP
The then President of the SESS entered into a contractual agreement with a major maker of ERPs. This campus-wide system Banner® is touted as world’s most widely used collegiate administrative suite of student, financial aid, finance, human resources, and advancement systems. It is a tightly integrated suite of proven, scalable, enterprise-wide applications on a single database, designed to support institutions of all sizes and types. This system uses Oracle®, a major relational database management system as its foundation, one used by both corporation and government agencies.
The aim of a relational system used by the majority of the SESS cluster of universities is to bring standardization and uniformity to the data and subsequent information used by consumers. This standardization will increase the ease and understanding when the SESS compares campus data. Figure 1 shows the home page screen for the Banner ERP, with folders representing the main system modules.
Figure 1. Screen of home page indicating modules in the ERP
The campuses should give credit to the system office for realizing early the vast scope of this transition and allocating considerable resources to the campuses. This type of support was incredibly needed and beneficial to all campuses, particularly campuses with limited information technology capacity. A lesson for the high-level decision stage is for the stakeholders to give an accurate depiction of strengths and needs early on in order to identify and allocate sufficient resources to the entire project.