“Oracle Lands $100M ERP Project Covering 34 Colleges”

link: http://www.computerworld.com/article/2496725/enterprise-resource-planning/oracle-lands–100m-erp-project-covering-34-colleges.html

Hi class, I selected the article “Oracle Lands $100M ERP Project Covering 34 Colleges” because I wanted to apply ERPs to an institution that we are all familiar with since we are all students at Temple. Many universities suffer from the “silo approach” where information and communication in an organization isn’t fluid amongst different departments. This article highlights 34 Washington schools striving to break down these silos and ultimately increase efficiency at their university through implementation of Oracle’s next generation Fusion Application. Though this project’s implementation could result in great benefit for these universities; the article discusses numerous discrepancies that could make this project a poor investment as well. Oracle’s contract totaled 100 million dollars, however with a project so large; predictive analytics, budgeting, and establishing a legitimate time line for completion are all difficult to predict accurately. This investment could be successful as long as the universities’ needs are addressed by the system appropriately, and the risk associated with the project has been accounted for and mitigated as much as possible. Each of the proposed questions below applies to the article and is discussed in this week’s textbook chapter.

 Questions:

1. From the college’s view, what is the risk associated with allocating immense financial resources and 5 years for this ERP system’s implementation?

2. Are these colleges more likely to adopt a “processes as a whole” type ERP system or a “single process” type ERP system? Why may this be the case?

3. Which business functions (supply chain management, human resources, customer relationship management.. ect.) will Oracle and these colleges hinge their ERP system on and why?