Technology & Learning - January 2008 - (Page 20)

“What ERP brought was a disciplined approach to doing business. When you’re running by a paperwork process, mistakes will be made.” student San Diego School District. “What ERP brought was a disciplined approach to doing business. When you’re running by a paperwork process, mistakes will be made.” May not be long before other schools choose to follow suit, emulating San Diego’s model. Indeed, ERP as an industry is expected to grow by as much as 11 percent in the next four years. And much of that growth can be credited to a renewed interest in schools countrywide looking to jettison their old “legacy” computer systems.These older systems, typically built piecemeal over time, using COBAL, are inadequate to handle the current crush of data generated by No Child Left Behind reporting mandates. It seems ERP is back. And despite a shaky track record in both business and education, it just might work. money through improved efficiencies: redundancy is eliminated and employees can take advantage of ERP features that make it easy to track production schedules, to control inventory and purchasing, and to follow planned maintenance schedules. All steps that save money. But many of the ERP projects underway in the late 1990s were notoriously difficult to implement and so riddled by cost overruns they were abandoned. According to a recent report in the Wall Street Journal, both Hershey Co. and Nike Inc. blamed faulty software for multimillion-dollar write-offs. And Hewlett-Packard Co. estimated it lost nearly $120 million when it couldn’t respond to an order backlog caused by its new inventory system. “No one wanted to use the word ERP,” industry analyst Lee Geishecker told the Journal. “For a while it was taboo.” ERP: expand and reduce Like their business counterparts, schools walked away from their ERP projects. No question, the system was (and remains) a huge, upfront expense; for public schools that’s taxpayer money, making the review and approval process difficult for those districts attempting to gain the necessary political support. And with the average tenure of a K–12 superintendent being a short six years, most projects lacked leadership and were never completed. In fact, of districts attempting to implement ERP in the past 10 years, half have failed. “Fifty percent failure? Those are the ones that blatantly shut down,” says Robert Bradford, an Atlanta-based ERP consultant with Capital Principles. “That percentage should be much higher when you think of the systems that are there but never got off the ground.” But executives across all industries haven’t found a great alternative to ERP when it comes to automating business tasks. And buying separate applications makes your IT infrastructure hard to support and even harder to integrate. One alternative approach to ERP is the “middleware” or “best of breed” applications. Certain schools, in fact, are opting for such software that “glues” together different applications. These cheaper middleware or best of breed solutions let those with smaller IT budgets make internal operations available via the Internet—without completely abandoning their existing systems. So popular have these middleware products become that in 2007 ERP giants like SAP and Oracle/PeopleSoft introduced their own versions, prompting industry observers to question if ERP was nearing its end. Simple theory, vast system Long a mainstay in manufacturing companies that could afford to invest in information technology, ERP is a valuable tool for those wanting to combine department functions. The systems are massive (usually with millions of lines of computer code), but the theory behind them is quite simple. ERP is based on building a centralized network so that departments within an organization can share information housed on a single database. For instance, instead of having separate programs written for specific functions in different departments such as HR and finance, ERP streamlines the entire operation with one multifeatured application software package. Such systems, many of which are offered by SAP and Oracle/PeopleSoft, have certainly been popular at companies that process customer orders, where a single system tracks an order from placement through delivery. When ERP works, it has saved companies a lot of 20 | www.techlearning.com http://www.techlearning.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Technology & Learning - January 2008

Technology & Learning - January 2008 Contents Editor's Desk News & Trends Product Guide Reviews Cover Story: Ten Top Tech Trends ERP Makes a Comeback Tossing Out Textbooks LOY Profile Series Higher Ed How To Bottom Line What's New Emerging Tech

Technology & Learning - January 2008

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