What is it?

The joint ERP Development Centre Project is funded by the UGC under the Restructuring and Collaboration Fund. It is a joint project of City University of Hong Kong (CityU), Hong Kong Institute of Education (HKIED) and Lingnan University (LU).

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) or simply enterprise systems are computer-based information systems that integrate all major functions of various departments across an organization onto a single hardware/software platform. With accurate Enterprise data and information directly being fed from the ERP, many business processes and service provisions can be automated and fine-tuned. As a result, our staff and students can enjoy proactive, timely, and quality services. Consequently, such a system for higher education institutions has the following important attributes:

Universities in Hong Kong have adopted different approaches in their ERP implementation. For CityU, HKIED and LU, Banner system was adopted as the ERP software though there are variations in the modules implemented.

The cost of deploying ERP software is generally very high due to its wide scope and great complexity. The most expensive item of all is implementation. Resistance to change, data issues, lack of understanding of software capabilities and lack of internal expertise are common obstacles faced by institutions in implementing ERP. A significant amount hence is spent on consultation services and customisations. The collaboration project aims to enable technology and skill transfer, and reduces the consultancy cost on areas that are common to all three institutions.

The main objectives of the project are:

Progress

The project started in early 2005. A full Management Committee, comprising the Chief Information Officers and the directors/representatives of the IT departments, was established to set the directions and monitor the development of the project. Each institution takes turn to be the chairman of the Committee. The Chief Information Officer of CityU, Dr J Yu, was elected to be the chairman for the first year.

The scope of the Project includes the setting up and operation of a technical environment for testing the new versions of Banner as well as other development work, Banner upgrade, enhancement of Banner to support Chinese, common system development, joint consultancy and training, etc. As of end of November, an ERP server had been set up and three different versions of Banner including one for testing Chinese localisation been installed for further development and testing.

Chinese localisation is one of the key tasks. Banner is a US-based software, and implementation of Chinese is well known to be complicated. Though the vendor of Banner has been expanding the software to accept a few more languages in addition to English, the support of Chinese is still at a very preliminary stage. In addition, we are not satisfied with a simple switch of display from English to Chinese. In the Hong Kong context, there are data elements which have to be stored and displayed in both English and Chinese. The Committee has endorsed a strategy that the internal code be "Unicode" and that the standard character set be based on Hong Kong Supplementary Character Set (HKSCS) developed by the Hong Kong SAR. A Task Force has also been established to work on this area. It has identified initially what sort of data elements that require both languages and made recommendations as to how to store and display these data. Currently they are working out a mock on the joint ERP server for further deliberations.

Workshops and Seminars

Four workshops/seminars have been conducted during the year. The topics are: Banner Finance, email as an integral part of ERP, leave information system and Banner 7 training. Despite that the topics were intended for the member institutions, in the spirit of collaboration and experience sharing, some of them were extended to all the eight UGC funded institutions as well as Vocation Training Council, Open University of Hong Kong and Hong Kong Academy of Performing Arts.

Looking Forward

The project is progressing well. A solid foundation has been laid for further experimentation and development of ERP in the remaining duration of the project. More seminars might be organized to facilitate knowledge sharing of ERP for the member institutions and other universities as appropriate.