La Trobe University operates over six campuses in Victoria, with 3200 staff and 34,000 enrolled students. Over the last two years, the university’s Information and Communications Technology department has made some sweeping changes to modernise its SAP landscape and invest in HANA to facilitate cutting-edge research. Freya Purnell reports.
About three years ago, the ICT function within La Trobe University was decentralised. While the move may have delivered some short-term benefits within individual faculties, it also meant systems were being duplicated across the university, resulting in lost efficiencies.
La Trobe executive director and CIO Ged Doyle was brought in about two years ago to undertake a rationalisation and consolidation program as well as enhance how technology is used within the faculties, learning and teaching, research and administrative functions.
“One of the reasons I was asked to come in was to try and rationalise down to the fewest number of core systems which would serve the vast majority of the university,” Doyle says.
SAP was one of those core systems, but at the time, it was only being used by finance and HR, and wasn’t delivering on its full potential to the organisation.
“It was poorly configured, and the business was crying out for all sorts of other views of information which they simply couldn’t get because the various systems were not integrated and they had different, duplicate sources of the truth,” Doyle says.
Having assessed the solution landscape, Doyle and his team decided that SAP would be one of the few core systems that La Trobe would use going forward. This decision was reached following a detailed Value Engineering exercise, including evaluating return on investment.
“SAP will be used extensively across administration in the fundamental areas like finance, HR and business intelligence, but it will also be used heavily at the backend too for both storage and processing,” Doyle says.
Rock-solid financials
The first step on this journey began with a reimplementation of the FICO module. The university’s budget process also required significant re-engineering. As in many organisations, Excel is the data manipulation tool of choice, using data taken from core systems.
“It is manual, error-prone, extremely inefficient, and there aren’t the appropriate levels of audit controls on that information,” Doyle says.
To combat this, he has instituted a distinction between validated data, which is drawn directly from the core systems, and unvalidated data, which has been pulled into Excel and so is open to manipulation, potential error and interpretation.
Also hampering their operations was an old Windows-based version of SAP Business Planning and Consolidation – which they threw out in favour of the NetWeaver version of BPC.
“It’s still quite embryonic, as we have only done one iteration of the budget using the new BPC, but because it’s fully integrated with the rest of the product suite, that adds enormous value, reduced complexity and process efficiencies.”
To gain a better insight into the university’s profitability, SAP Profitability and Cost Management has also recently been implemented.
Improving the management of project finances
The next stage of the program was to improve how projects were being managed and project finances reported. The three areas of the university which were most commonly running projects were infrastructure and operations (buildings and ground maintenance), research and ICT.
Greg Hill, director of enterprise applications at La Trobe, says while these diverse areas used SAP Funds Management to monitor costs relating to projects, it was quite a manual process and the ability to report on this information was minimal.
“Finance found it quite hard to report during and post projects. There was a lot of reconciling and reporting outside of the system to understand how the budgets of the projects were going,” Hill says.
The solution to this was implementing SAP’s Project Systems module, with all projects, no matter what their size, now running through this system. The very diverse nature of the projects did present some implementation challenges.
“From a delivery standpoint, you could be dealing with projects that are maybe a few thousand dollars right up to large capital works projects. That presents challenges because the amount of information that’s required for a big project is quite different depending on which department is doing it,” Hill says. “The other part is the reporting, because you have different reporting requirements if you are doing a research project compared to a capital works project.”
La Trobe CFO, Pranay Lodhiya, was very supportive of this approach and drove the finance and project systems projects extremely well.
Business intelligence
La Trobe didn’t just lack reporting capability in the project area. Across the university, BusinessObjects and Crystal Reports were being used, but in “very ad hoc and stand alone ways”. One of the single biggest issues the university faced was access to meaningful and timely business information.
The university now has a business intelligence team and enterprise data warehouse in place, and is now using BW and SAP’s BI suite to generate various reports across the institution. It will become the standard reporting mechanism.
“From having zero business intelligence capability a year ago, we now have a number of completed projects and dedicated permanent in-house capability, which is just fantastic.”
Having a coherent strategy is providing the university with exposure to information it has never had.
“For example, if we wanted to tie finance data to space data to human capital to all lecture timetables, we just could not have done it in the past because none of these systems were connected, and some of them contained duplicate or inconsistent data which was structured in different ways,” Doyle says.
“Now we have the capability to link together what would have been disparate information and then start drawing some conclusions that we wouldn’t have been able to before. It creates enormous efficiencies and a view of information that will become a strategic enabler to the university.”
Hybrid model for HCM?
Another thorn in La Trobe’s side has been its SAP HR solution. “Again, that has been very poorly implemented, and the processes around it are less than optimal,” Doyle says.
Though it was clear the HCM system needed to be streamlined and reimplemented, the organisation was also desperate to implement a performance management system.
La Trobe was faced with a choice – implement this within the old HCM system, or move into the cloud with SuccessFactors, which had only just been acquired by SAP.
Doyle says that one of the overarching IT principles he has put in place since joining the university is ‘what can economically, sensibly and functionally can be done in a core system will be’. But while they had already paid for SAP HCM licences, it was clear that this was not in line with SAP’s strategic direction in the HR area.
“SuccessFactors was a cloud solution, and the web-enabled environment was substantially better, more intuitive and friendlier than the HCM solution. It also sat on top of BusinessObjects reporting, which was clearly synonymous and compatible with our own strategies,” Doyle says.
La Trobe decided to embrace the cloud solution, implementing it in January this year, in a quick, convenient and virtually cost neutral project – with the added advantage of coming in a more attractive package with a nicer UI.
The performance data from SuccessFactors is linked back to the SAP HCM module, and a project is underway to completely revamp this solution. Because SuccessFactors still cannot provide a full HCM suite, Doyle expects the outcome to be a hybrid solution, with some on-premise component.
Powering high-calibre research with HANA
Research is a major part of the university’s mission, and ensuring La Trobe’s researchers have access to the tools and infrastructure they need is of critical importance for the ICT function.The biggest challenge they faced in this area was dealing with massive volumes of data. For example, one project, which stores its data on a SQL database, had to wait three weeks for data to be processed and another week for analysis. Researchers were using hardware which was often old and out of date, creating issues with sourcing parts and declining reliability – of particular concern on projects which required real-time online capabilities for experiments.
“If any of these experiments failed, sometimes it’s just a lost opportunity that can’t be repeated, and sometimes you can repeat it but you have got to start again, and they may run for days at a time, using terabytes of data. So our ability to support the researchers is fundamental,” Doyle says.
To improve its capability in this area, La Trobe invested in SAP HANA, which in the first instance, will provide the pure number-crunching power needed to deliver reliable, real-time results on these research projects.
Representatives from La Trobe have also been working with the SAP Research Laboratories in Brisbane on defining more “world-changing” projects that could run on HANA.
In the future, La Trobe will also look at how HANA can be utilised in its own SAP environment.
“Where we can use it is to try and improve the turnaround of information back to the university, either to the student or to the staff member, instead of having to wait for jobs to batch overnight or on weekends,” Hill says.
An organisational shift
There’s no doubt that across the university’s SAP landscape, a phenomenal amount of work has been achieved in just 18 months. While La Trobe has worked with a range of partners including Clarity Business Solutions, Acclimation, UXC Oxygen and Presence of IT, the change has really been enabled by some significant shifts in the capability of the IT function, and how it engages with the university’s faculties and business units.
When Doyle started in his role, he says ICT had low technical capability, a poor relationship with the business, and no structural discipline over how strategy or projects ran.
“The first 12 months was really about stabilising the environment, bringing in some external skills to help supplement the internal people, mentoring them and undertaking substantial training.”
For example, over 70 staff have been through Lean Practitioner training, which provides tools and techniques to eliminate waste from processes.
Giving staff these extra ‘strings to their bow’ has been critical to the success of the rationalisation and consolidation program.
“It created a much better working relationship with the business. ICT’s credibility has been increased as a result, so we can talk to the business as strategic partners now, which we were never able to do before,” Doyle says.
The focus on eliminating non-core solutions in favour of utilising core system functionality has also resulted in La Trobe instituting new processes to ensure the integrity of this applications strategy is maintained.
“We have a business engagement team, and each of those managers meets with key stakeholders of each faculty or department on a regular basis, and actually tease out what requirements they have,” Hill says.
Again, it is one of the ICT principles that it is the responsibility of the business to articulate the problem and not the solution.
“The engagement team then brings the high-level requirements to the applications team, and it’s up to us to decide what the solution is going to be within the architectural and information framework. We ascertain whether we can actually and deliver it in our current application portfolio before we go and buy something brand new.”
La Trobe has also been fostering a closer relationship with SAP. Engaging the vendor on what the future roadmap could look like and in the early stages of projects is a real step change for the university, according to Hill.
Future roadmap
While the rationalisation program still has a couple of years to run, La Trobe has just signed a contract to implement modules from Student Life Cycle Management (SLCM).
Having discovered that there was no mitigation strategy in place for the current student system, Doyle turned to his colleagues on the global SAP Higher Education and Research Advisory Council. SLCM is in place in over 100 universities around the world but La Trobe will be the first university in Australia to implement it. While SLCM will initially be utilised for subject, course management and equivalency, this only marks the start of a potential substantial program of work.
Doyle certainly has a strong vision for SAP at La Trobe.
“We will expand the product use on a fit for purpose and strategic basis as the business need arises. Where we can shut other systems down and pull that core functionality inside another core system like SAP, then we will. It is fundamentally and critically important to the future success of the university.”
This article first appeared in Inside SAP Summer 2014.
