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CASE STUDY 3.1

UNI UNIVERSITY AND ITS NEW

ERP SYSTEM*

In the summer of 1996 Uni, an elite US university, began modernizing its administra-
tive information systems through a two-year ERP implementation that was officially
announced as a project to benefit all constituencies. Uni was one of the first universities
to select ERP and chose to work with ConsultCo Corporation in order to develop two
software modules – grants and contracts activities. That October the project structure
was formed and functional teams were created with co-business and technical lead-
ers. The composition of teams was mostly Uni middle-level managers from Central
Administration whose permanent positions had been back-filled for the duration of
the project. Although an experienced ERP project manager had been hired, the real
authority lay with the teams who communicated directly with Uni’s newly appointed
Vice President for Finance and Administration.
Once underway, the project team found that ConsultCo’s technical experts were
not on-site as often as expected, leaving team members working with an incomplete
software suite and having to imagine how the grants and contracts module would
be integrated. Worried about the project’s progress after a year of high-level theo-
rizing, Uni hired consultants to audit the readiness of the software for its scheduled
‘big bang’ implementation in October 1998. Their findings caused Uni to modify
expectations and switch to a phased implementation strategy adopting a revised
deadline of July 1999 for the fully integrated suite. This date marked the beginning
of Uni’s year 2000 fiscal calendar and as such it represented the deadline for retiring
legacy systems at risk of the millennium bug. Uni met its ‘drop dead date’ in that
the skeleton ERP was operational on the first day of the new fiscal year but the user
interface and reporting environment still required significant development. The sub-
optimal roll-out of the ERP was complicated by user resistance to the grants and con-
tracts design. The academic constituencies who had expectations of an improved
working environment were unable to complete crucial administrative tasks. Faculty
demanded changes in the ERP’s design as well as interim support for their adminis-
trators whose workload increased dramatically in the ERP-enabled environment. For
more than two years the project team was involved in post-implementation design
changes before finally receiving buy-in from the academic community. The chronol-
ogy of events is graphically illustrated in the below timeline.
* This case is co-authored by Erica Wagner and Sue Newell. Adapted from Wagner and Newell
(2004).

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