La Trobe University: A Model for Success Amid the Rapidly Shifting Dynamics of Higher Education

Transcription

1 2015 SAP SE or an SAP affiliate company. All rights reserved. La Trobe University: A Model for Success Amid the Rapidly Shifting Dynamics of Higher Education As forces like deregulation, funding uncertainties, and the move from capital to operational expenses continue to reshape the higher education market, universities must increasingly rely on technology to remain competitive. Australia s La Trobe University is demonstrating a formula for success in this fast-changing environment through use of cloud technology from SAP.

2 Organization La Trobe University Location Melbourne, Australia Industry Higher education and research Products and Services Undergraduate and postgraduate education, research Employees 3,000 Web Site BUSINESS TRANSFORMATION Objectives Compete effectively for students and funding in a challenging, increasingly complex higher education environment Push the boundaries of the educational experience for students Lift the administrative overhead burden from the teaching staff and researchers so they can concentrate on their core activities and most essential tasks The resolution Became the first organization in the world to go live with SAP S/4HANA and the SAP Simple Finance solution deployed using the SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud service Adopted solutions from SuccessFactors, an SAP company, for human capital management (HCM) Took advantage of SAP Service and Support offerings to help with implementations Benefits Enhanced the user experience Simplified processes with no latency Increased data reliability TOP BENEFITS ACHIEVED 20% Efficiency increase Up to 7x Faster business processes 4 People now running payroll, down from As the first to adopt SAP Simple Finance, we will benefit from instant insight to drive value through planning, analysis, prediction, and simulation. We have a term for it: Brilliant Basics. Peter Nikoletatos, Executive Director and CIO, La Trobe University 2 / 6

3 Becoming a future-ready, digitally connected university Higher education is a highly competitive business. To retain existing students, attract new ones, and command research funding, universities must demonstrate a degree of technological savviness never before demanded. Satisfying students and getting the most out of the staff requires providing people with needed data immediately, at any time in any place. Educational institutions must provide the type of environment for information exchange that people have come to expect from their social media experiences. At the same time, universities face ever-tighter capital budgets. They must find ways to do more with less and to shift expenses to operational budgets. Australia deregulated higher education recently, compounding the challenges for institutions like La Trobe University of Melbourne, one of the country s leading educational institutions. Facing increasing pressure as new challenges like managing and analyzing Big Data continued to mount, La Trobe knew it needed to adopt a highly flexible and scalable IT strategy that slashed the cost and time required to move to new solutions. In short, we had to become future ready by building a sustainable model, summarizes Peter Nikoletatos, executive director and CIO for La Trobe. We needed to provide a higher-quality experience for our students while increasing staff efficiency and lowering our overall costs. We also needed to satisfy the performance demands of our 35,000 students during peak periods while scaling back costs automatically during quiet periods. There s a word for that, and it s cloud. 3 / 6

4 Cloud solutions from SAP provide the needed edge For help in moving to cloud technology, the university looked to SAP, which supplies the business applications it uses. The cloud strategy that SAP follows is closely aligned with ours, explains Nikoletatos. By adopting the SAP Cloud portfolio, we disrupted some of our old processes where we d had some bad habits like customization and work-arounds. We picked up the world s best practices from SAP Simple Finance and began using them the very first day, adds Gary Seach, La Trobe s CFO. That greatly simplified and sped up the way we do things going forward. La Trobe s commitment to SAP Cloud was total. The university became the first organization of any kind in the world to go live with SAP S/4HANA and SAP Simple Finance for all its enterprise resource planning needs. It also implemented solutions from the SAP SuccessFactors HCM Suite as well as SAP Fiori apps for empowering students and staff to access needed information using their mobile devices. All these applications are provided as services from SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud. The university also counted on SAP for implementation assistance. Our relationship with the Service & Support organization was really important for a couple of reasons, Nikoletatos says. One, we had access to highly skilled people whenever we needed them. And two, we had one person to contact with any problem, issue, or request we had. S&S helped us with the implementation of SAP Simple Finance as well as the migration to SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud. They were with us along the whole journey of this project, from the very embryonic stages right through to the formation of the team and the eventual delivery and support after going live. 4 / 6

5 Managing the business day by day, not month by month As it rolls out SAP S/4HANA and SAP Simple Finance, La Trobe is focusing on enabling end users and improving their experience. Reports appear in real time, not after overnight runs. Month-end reporting used to take over a week, but we re on track to get it down to two or three days, Seach notes. In addition, people who need a piece of financial information can access data themselves in real time, and the improved user interface of SAP Simple Finance encourages them to do so. Greater staff efficiency means more time for improving the La Trobe educational experience. Students benefit not only from this extra staff attention but also from having a truly state-of-theart IT environment for maximizing the value of their time at the university. We want to wow our students, and our cloud solutions from SAP are helping us do that in many ways, says Greg Hill, director of the applications team at La Trobe. Our happy students are spreading the word about the quality of the educational experience here. The systems we provide are starting to look more like what students use in their social life. That makes them more likely to recommend La Trobe to others, which will help us increase our enrollment and improve our funding position. Best of all, we have achieved our future-proofing goal, adds Nikoletatos. The next time new software emerges that we want to take advantage of, we simply change our subscription. No hardware or software to buy, no implementation to worry about, and no delays getting started. KEY BENEFITS 100% Cloud-based environment within 1 year 0 Delay in receiving reports 5 / 6

6 La Trobe University Onward to 100% cloud within a year SAP Simple Finance is opening new doors for La Trobe. One effort currently under way is to consolidate a single statement for students that shows exactly what they owe the institution. In the past this was too difficult, with fees strewn throughout the administrative system, the library system, and others. Another thrust is to provide research personnel with complete visibility into where they stand on grant expenditures equipping them to make better decisions on future projects. Again, this was too difficult before SAP Simple Finance replaced multiple legacy systems. Next up for transition to SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud are the SAP BusinessObjects business intelligence solutions and the SAP Business Warehouse application that La Trobe uses for analysis, along with the SAP solutions for governance, risk, and compliance and the SAP Student Lifecycle Management application. Our goal is to have every stitch of our SAP software reside in the cloud within a year, concludes Nikoletatos. I can t wait (15/08) 6 / 6

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