There has been a lot of debate over whether there should be ERP for higher education. Many believe that the cost involved with installing and maintaining a traditional ERP system is simply too much. Some even question the wisdom of investing in an ERP system for colleges and universities because so many of them rely on catalogs and papers for their information. The truth is that a comprehensive ERP solution can help colleges cut costs by improving their inventory management, financial data management, student records, course catalogs, teaching tools, AI and data science projects, and student support services. It is also expected that a well-designed ERP system can eliminate or reduce the current disadvantages that colleges face today such as under-utilization of teaching resources, poor quality of study materials, high student mobility and poor maintenance of institutional facilities.
In fact, many professors argue that colleges and universities are facing so many challenges these days that it is not surprising if people think they should go for an ERP system. The fact is that colleges and universities have a lot of administrative and non-administrative activities which need to be tracked. An ERP system will enable colleges to better manage those activities. There are several advantages of going for ERP for higher education.
The first advantage is to improve the quality of decision-making. There has been a lot of criticism on recent years about the poor quality of decisions that colleges and universities make. If the processes used were properly analyzed, the reasons for poor decision-making would be identified and improved upon. Implementing ERP for higher education institutions can help resolve these problems. Implementing ERP can improve decision-making quality significantly.
Another advantage is to identify best practices. Institutional workflow is notoriously problematic. There are many processes involved including the allocation of resources, acquisition of technology, migration of processes to the ERP system and adoption of best practices. All these processes must be well-maintained to ensure that ERP for higher education institutions can provide the best service.
Enterprise resource planning software packages often provide collaboration tools and workflow applications. However, human resources tasks often take up a substantial amount of time and effort. Human resource tasks such as recruiting, hiring, managing the training and development programs and maintaining the payroll processes can easily be outsourced. This would allow ERP vendors to focus more on other areas like developing new technologies, implementing best practices and improving the efficiency with which human resource tasks are performed.
Implementing ERP for higher education institutions has other benefits. Once an organization adopts ERP, it becomes easier to implement ERP applications and make ERP implementations in practice. This is because ERP software packages can be easily managed by application developers and the change management process is simplified. The IT change management process takes a considerable amount of time if it is not properly managed, so the adoption of ERP for higher education institutions helps to reduce the timeframe involved in ERP implementation.
Enterprise resource planning software packages often have extensive interfaces and extensibility features. In addition, these packages also enable organizations to use third party applications and plug-ins. The complexity and customization required in ERP integration often poses a problem for the organizations. On the other hand, integrating high-end ERP systems functionalities with third party applications and plug-ins requires little technical knowledge and only minimal training. Hence, most of the organizations choose to implement ERP systems in combination with legacy ERP systems, which provide them with better scalability and functionality, as well as greater adaptability to changing market conditions.
Integration can occur in several ways, such as manual and automated process, through manual and non-automated processes, or using both processes. The role of a change management team should therefore be active throughout the implementation process by taking Project Management Courses your ERP integration results can be successful if they are implemented using the right ERP software architecture, coupled with appropriate change management strategies. Implementation of ERP solutions can reduce the costs and improve the operational efficiency of a organization, but if these plans are poorly implemented, the benefits can be minimal.