Professional IT resources facilitate Canadian university’s ERP implementation

Client

This very large Canadian university has more than 6000 employees spread across five campuses. They and their students are reliant upon both the computing and media services offered, for teaching, learning, research, and administration. The legacy system could no longer support modern demands and needed to be replaced. 

Challenge

This client was about to undertake the replacement of legacy computer and information technology systems (including manual processes) across their entire five-campus footprint. The Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) project was a new implementation for multiple enterprise-level applications, as infrastructure updates were required for:

• Human Capital Management

• Portals and Identity & Access Management 

• Enterprise Learning and Training

• Financials, Assets, Procurement

• Project Management

• Campus Solutions integration

As an institute of higher education, cost-effective solutions were extremely important. But of utmost importance was continuity of service during the transition. 

Solution

S.i. Systems began working with this large Canadian university in 2009, providing professional EdTech staffing and payrolling (Flo-Thru™)  services to support major IT projects. They had already been developing and implementing IT campus solutions, infrastructure delivery, requirements analysis, future state design, organizational change management, security, quality assurance, and user training. When it came time for the university to undertake an ERP, they turned to S.i. Systems again.

After designing a strategy, S.i. Systems was able to execute on the agreed upon plan. We provided resources in a broad spectrum of categories to support multiple enterprise-level application and infrastructure solutions, deploying more than 990 unique resources in ERP-related specialties. Our contingent staff undertook many assignments, including for administration, architecture, cyber security, data & analytics, digital media & training, network & infrastructure, project management, software development, and quality assurance.

Outcomes 

The university successfully rolled out its new ERP without any disruption to the continuity of service, on time and on budget.

This was one more successful project that we have delivered over our 23 year history of supporting this university. During that time we have facilitated resources specific to their PeopleSoft initiative and other IT and business requirements. Of the 990+ unique resources we have placed, over 58% were renewed to extend their time with this client. 

Highlights of our resources successes include:

• Developed a middleware technical upgrade strategy.

• Provided technical architecture expertise to support the adoption and integration of the ERP applications into the business workflow.

• Supported SSO security with CAS integrations. 

• Provided system administration support to maintain, support and resolve issues with their infrastructure (e.g. web-servers, application servers, process schedulers). 

• Applied patches and fixes as part of the maintenance phase of their ongoing software development lifecycle to correct faults and improve performance.