A Proposed Framework for University ERP Implementation

Abstract

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems are widely used systems across the world. At the beginning, they were business organizational technology, which are used to improve companies’ performance and to manage their functions in order to increase the profit. Recently, universities started to implement the ERP systems to exploit it to improve the ability of controlling their academic and administrative functions. The core concept of the ERP is the integrity, when using a centralized database to combine all organization’s departments’ software. University’s ERP contains modules to support student management and administration, management of human resources, library, e-learning. . . etc. But, our university suffer from the fragmented computerized systems, as each department has a separated system. That created several problems, such as multiple identifications of data, no integrated solution, and data redundancy. In this thesis, the Palestine Polytechnic University is our case study in order to analyze and explore the technical success factors to attempt increasing the implementation success of university ERP system. After exploring technical success factors, we built an implementation framework for PPU’s ERP system. The main two results of the thesis consist of creating and improving a pre-implementation knowledge about ERP systems, in addition to highlight the action points about which technical success factors must the university concern before starting ERP implementation. So, creating an ERP implementation framework that considered a guideline that clarifies the implementation process to reduce the possibility of problems that may arise from changing the system.