By Freya Purnell
La Trobe University will become the first SAP customer globally to deploy SAP Simple Finance powered by SAP HANA in the cloud, in an expansion of its SAP footprint.
The university has also announced it will implement the SAP Student Lifecycle Management application, the first of its kind in Australia, to support its five-year ‘Future-Ready Strategic Plan’.
The objectives of the strategic plan include simplifying operations, attracting creative and independent thinkers, supporting a highly skilled and motivated workforce, developing a lively, connected campus, boosting its national and international ranking, and improving sustainability through enhanced intellectual, physical and financial resources.
According to SAP, the selection of SAP Simple Finance will provide finance department and colleges with instant insight across devices to help the university drive value while significantly simplifying its entire IT landscape and architecture.
The implementation of SAP Student Lifecycle Management is designed to enable La Trobe to better support students and staff by providing an end-to-end view of the student experience. It will not only enable staff to quickly manage subjects, courses, student records and a multitude of other tasks, but lays the foundation for the university’s mobile strategy, which aims to provide students with direct access to all their information, such as timetables, meetings, e-mail, financial commitment, test scores and a host of services specific to their academic experience.
The implementation of these solutions build on what has been a multiple-year “rationalisation, consolidation and risk mitigation program in parallel with a ‘whole of business’ application portfolio and infrastructure modernisation program”, according to Ged Doyle, executive director and CIO, La Trobe University (see our case study on this program).
“In partnership with SAP, we are delivering on a digital strategy that has allowed us to eliminate in-house legacy systems and countless hours of support effort. More importantly La Trobe is simplifying work for our staff so they can focus on supporting students and alumni while at the same time creating a technology environment to support the ever-increasing digital needs of our students, wherever and whenever they want it,” said Doyle.
La Trobe is also scheduled to go live this month with SuccessFactors Employee Central, which complements its existing SuccessFactors Performance Management solution, which it rolled out in 2013 to support 3400 employees.
“Our move to the cloud removes considerable complexity from our environment. But what is really exciting is our ability to have visibility and insight into data that was previously not possible,” Doyle said.
La Trobe has also undertaken a pilot project to understand the viability and performance of SAP HANA when applied to the large data sets vital to research programs. This initial pilot used SAP HANA to process massive amounts of data related to vehicle collision detection, and reduced report processing time from four weeks to just 3.5 seconds. The university is now exploring extending this platform to five data-intensive Research Focus Areas.
Andrew Barkla, president and managing director of SAP Australia and New Zealand, said, “Through cloud deployment and the in-memory technology in SAP HANA, the university is ahead of the game in Australia and globally in innovating the student experience.”
“La Trobe, through the vision, insight and drive of Ged Doyle, provides a trailblazing example of a recurring theme we see with our most advanced university customers: they want to lay a flexible, open-ended operational foundation for the future while protecting the value in their existing IT investments,” said Malcolm Woodfield, global vice president, Higher Education and Research, SAP. “Beyond operations, La Trobe is alongside some of the world’s leading research institutions in deploying the SAP HANA platform to speed data analysis in advanced research.”
