During my interactions with Educational Institutes during the last decade, the most common question came from the Educators or the Institute owners was, Why most of the times the ERP implementation fails in educational institutions?. Below are the contributors to the success of ERP in Education, which I experienced in my careers spanning 15 years;
1. User/Operators: The users or stakeholders play an important role in ERP implementation by inputting the configuration and transaction data. If the users are not tech savvy or not interested to share their processes and not sparing time to enter data, naturally the ERP implementation fails
2. Training: Proper training of the operators is required to increase the usage of multiple features of the ERP.
3. Infrastructure: The success is more on the cloud because the sever is in secured environment with proper back-ups. The users interest gets fade away with frequent data loss in on-premise installations.
4. Services: Annual Support or Maintenance Contract is necessary for maintaining the ERP, as per the business dynamics, if not done, ERP goes out of operation eventually and the operators moves to excel or other utilities to prepare reports.
5. User friendliness: The ERP should be user friendly so that the users easily understand and use the software.
6. Integration: The ERP must provide integrations with various hardware devices used for attendance, Social media, APIs and legacy systems.
7. Customisation for Undefined Internal Processes: Many times it happens that there are some internal processes which are not clearly defined. If the ERP is customized for internal processes by proper brain storming with the stakeholders it increases the utilization of the ERP.
8. Willingness of TOP management: The management must have a genuine interest in implementing the ERP, the push must come from the TOP. Management needs to be heavily involved as the result of the ERP is the decision support on which management can rely.
9. Migration : Data migration from existing legacy systems or integration plays a major role in the acceptance of the ERP by the users, as the users are usually reluctant to adopt to new software, if it involves re-entering the data again. The ERP should have good data migration tools and utilities so that the efforts of re-entering the data is eliminated.
10. Compliance with Government policies: The ERP must be inline with the rules and report requirement set by different accreditation bodies of the government.
11. Technological Advancements: The ERP must be as per the current technological advancements and the latest trends in the market.
12. Freezing of the Requirements: The ERP fails if the requirement is not freezed by the stake holders and keeps on changing. It destabilizes the ERP.
13. Communication: The communication between the stakeholders and Business analyst is very important. If anyone of them lack proper communication skills, it derails the implementation. So be it an College Management software, College MIS software, College Automation software or Learning Management System, the above factors need to be considered for a smooth and successful implementation. Want to know more, Click here to Schedule a free demo of Education ERP