If somebody tells you the time has come to improve your finance systems functionality, your first thought might be to pass the job on to someone in IT.
Universities have been propping up creaking legacy systems for some time now, to the detriment of their day-to-day business needs. There are new enterprise resource systems (ERP) out there, but you need to be sure the expense and disruption of updating or moving is going to get you the improvements you need.
In a university there’s a number of big, enterprise-level systems that need to work reliably and consistently. Your IT team is responsible for keeping these working and ensuring the data flows in and out in a straightforward way. So surely improving one of these pieces of infrastructure isn’t a strategic issue?
You’d be forgiven for thinking that way, but you’d be wrong. A new ERP implementation guide from the British Universities Finance Directors Group (BUFDG), supported by KPMG and drawing on the experience of numerous providers, sets out just what you are getting into if a new finance system is in your immediate future. And it is, absolutely, a strategic issue.
