A 2023 EDUCAUSE study found widespread interest in ERP modernization as institutions grapple with systems that are costly, difficult to maintain and not user-friendly. Nearly half of responding institutions said they had recently undergone an ERP upgrade, were in the middle of one or planned to upgrade in the next five years.
Michael Hofherr, senior vice president for Workday, a company offering ERP systems to university campuses and other clients, said his business has seen a growth in demand as schools face tighter budgets, shifting enrollment and rising expectations for a modern student experience.
LEGACY SYSTEMS
Many institutions face situations like that of Columbus State Community College (CSCC), a large community college serving more than 40,000 students. In 2016, the school started to look at upgrading its ERP system after years of operating with an on-premises system implemented in 2004.
According to Chief Information Officer Jennifer Anderson, the system had become heavily customized across different departments, making even routine updates difficult.
“For staff, it was tough, because you couldn’t see everything in one place,” she said. “If you were an adviser, you had two or three different systems open trying to figure out where was a student in the process, and it just wasn’t very transparent.”
Local customization often falls to campus IT staff, according to Roger Yohe, vice president of academic innovation and strategy for Palm Beach State College in Florida. Additionally, legacy systems are often housed in on-campus data centers, which pose risks of failure in the case of a natural disaster — a strong consideration in a hurricane-prone area like Palm Beach, Yohe said.
Hofherr said institutions also face broader structural problems with legacy systems not built for the AI era.
“Most legacy systems are decades old and can’t meet the expectations of today’s mobile, digital-native students,” he wrote in an email to Government Technology.
NEW SYSTEMS AND THE TRANSITION PROCESS
Some experts say cloud-based systems can address many of these issues. Yohe said he appreciates the ability to easily access the ERP interface remotely, even from a cellphone, especially in emergencies. Many commercial applications are cloud-based and have a simple user interface, Anderson said, but transitioning to a new system requires more than just new features.
The move to a new ERP system can force institutions to confront inconsistencies in their workflows — different departments may perform the same task in different ways, and cloud-based ERP systems are often less tolerant of the deep customization common to on-prem systems. That requires a strong and cohesive plan for what a cloud-based system should do and how it will be used.
“A vision, I think, is a strong thing to help center you, because otherwise it can just go off the rails,” Anderson said. “That was really helpful to us ongoing, throughout the whole project.”
She said data quality is another significant factor in successful ERP transition.
“Trying to pull data from all of the various things that we had was challenging, and so that led us to conversation around our whole architecture,” she said.
Anderson pointed out that back-end planning like this can lengthen the timeline for implementation. At CSCC, for example, she said they began looking at ERP upgrades in 2016 but tabled the idea, returned to it in 2019, took a break from the idea again due to the pandemic, and started their ERP upgrade in earnest in 2021, aiming for a 2023 launch.
Institutions must also prepare staff for the shift. Anderson said the college invested in change management practices, like creating internal teams tasked with implementing and communicating changes.
Yohe said institutions frequently underestimate staffing needs. While it’s helpful to offload maintenance of the ERP itself to the vendor, Palm Beach State still has a staff member dedicated to the platform.
The migrations have led to wins large and small, IT leaders said. Anderson said students no longer have to print out PDFs and hand them in, since forms are integrated into the ERP. At Palm Beach State, Yohe said staff are able to find new data insights because everything is more localized, which has led to strategic budgeting.
WHERE ERP IS HEADED
In the future, Yohe hopes ERP tools will be able to help with more data-driven course schedules rather than simply rolling over the catalog from the previous year and removing classes with low enrollment.
“We’re guessing at building course schedules,” he said. “What AI can do is help us take out that guesswork.”
As institutions migrate to cloud-based systems, ERP modernization is becoming less about a one-time overhaul and more about building capacity for continuous change, like with AI technology.
“Workday already has AI features in platform,” though Anderson said CSCC hasn’t enabled any yet. “It’s on everybody’s road map.”
