Successful ERP Implementation and Challenges: A Case Study of ERP Implementation at Private Educational Institute in Sri Lanka

Abstract

The Enterprise Resource Planning software market has been growing at a very fast pace over the last few years and has been predicted to keep growing rapidly in the long term. The objective of the study is to discuss the implementation process of successful implementation of an ERP system at a chosen private educational institute in Sri Lanka. Selected education institute is one of the largest private education conglomerates in the country which conducts both undergraduate and postgraduate programs with the partnerships of UK, USA, Canada and Australian universities as an International Program Centre. This has enabled introducing various university programs under Transnational Education System (TNE) in Sri Lanka. The institute shines with its motto of “education without borders”, which allows the younger generation to benefit from higher education in some of the best Universities and study destinations in the world. Hence, Institute’s ERP system can be categorized as a multi-university platform which facilitates to operate more than one country, one university, and also the degree programs are built-in absorbing credits from multiple universities. Multi-University platform is a rare found among the ERP systems which have been developed in the field of education and available with the ready-made purchase. The new ERP system has been introduced as a result of replacing the old system which was an in-house developed MIS, with the requirement of upgrading due to the various reasons, such as slowness, inability of transfer data, modification issues, not user friendly and limitation of expanding cater to future organizational and technical needs and staff/ student growth. MIS which was the old system supported the academic functions of Enrollment, Registrations, Examinations, Scheduling and other academic processes at the institute. ERP was developed to cover the same activities initially and will be expanded to accommodate other department functions in the future. Expansion will be initiated after a considerable time upon monitoring the performance of the initial stage. This study discusses the implementation process followed by the comparison of past literature