SAP Australia has scored up a win with Victoria’s La Trobe University becoming the first organisation globally to go live with SAP S/4HANA in the cloud.
La Trobe has replaced multiple legacy systems with the SAP Simple Finance cloud application in a bid to increase efficiency of more than 20 per cent across its business units, in the process dramatically simplifying its IT landscape and data footprint.
The move is part of a larger IT transformation in line with La Trobe’s Future Ready Strategic Plan, which aims to deliver “brilliant basics”, enhance the student experience and place the university in the top 500 institutions worldwide by 2017.
Peter Nikoletatos, executive director and CIO of La Trobe University, the university has chosen a disruptive approach to remaining competitive, using technology to drive better student experience and improved organisational efficiency.
“We have big ambitions. We want to be student-centric, but we don’t want to be just like every other institution. We want to change the way students engage and make that experience unique to La Trobe. With SAP S/4HANA, we are essentially creating time for our staff – simplifying our processes and giving much more capacity back to the business to focus on providing that unique La Trobe experience to our students,” he said.
Nikoletatos estimates that with SAP S/4HANA fully deployed, La Trobe University can deliver up to one day back per week to key users across its operations to focus on more student-centric activity and supporting the Future Ready Strategic Plan.
Prior to running SAP Simple Finance, it took weeks to complete month-end finance reports, but La Trobe expects this timeframe to reduce to a few days.
La Trobe University CFO Gary Search said, “We’re really looking to enable staff to manage the business on a day-to-day rather than a month-by-month basis.”
The simplified user experience of SAP S/4 HANA, based on SAP Fiori, is also expected to smooth the path for more end users to interact with the financial system.
“With the SAP Simple Finance component of SAP S/4HANA, we’re intending to empower our end users to use the SAP tools to drive their own data requirements and report in real time,” Seach said.
La Trobe already runs cloud-based solutions from SuccessFactors to support its people strategy and plans to move its SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence suite, components of the SAP Student Lifecycle Management and SAP Governance Risk and Compliance applications to the SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud by the end of 2015.
Andrew Barkla, president and managing director, SAP Australia and New Zealand, said, “Our relationship with La Trobe has been one of true partnership. We share its vision of delivering value to customers, and this value is inherent in moving to the cloud and powering applications with the real-time capabilities of SAP HANA.”
