Journal of Information Systems Education, Vol. 15(3)
Teaching Tip
Twelve Tips for Successfully Integrating Enterprise
Systems Across the Curriculum
Jane Fedorowicz
Ulric J. Gelinas, Jr.
Catherine Usoff
Department of Accounting and Information Systems
jfedorowicz@bentley.edu ugelinas@bentley.edu cusoff@bentley.edu
George Hachey
Department of Finance
ghachey@bentley.edu
Bentley College
175 Forest Street
Waltham, MA 02452
ABSTRACT
The use of enterprise systems in business curricula is recommended for the purpose of demonstrating both an integrated
view of the firm and the use of information technology to support the efficient and effective performance of business
processes to achieve organizational objectives. Based on the experience of a core group of faculty at a private business
university who integrated SAP into various business courses, the authors provide twelve tips for others who might want to
do the same. The tips are presented in three categories: 1) curriculum issues, 2) training and outside support, and 3) student
and faculty related issues. As more colleges consider inserting enterprise systems within their business curricula, effective
planning and efficient use of time and resources in these areas will help to reduce start-up time and bolster success.
Keywords: ERP, enterprise systems, business processes, business curriculum, SAP
for a newly minted graduate to grasp even more complex
interorganizational supply chains and information flows.
1. INTRODUCTION
One of the primary goals of a business education is to equip
students with the knowledge and skills to “hit the ground
running” when they begin their first jobs. Employers expect
new hires to understand how companies function in today’s
economy, which requires knowledge of basic business
processes and the technology used to support them.
Students need to be able to transcend the traditional
stovepipes of academic disciplines that have little
correlation with the elaborate relationships needed to
support business processes that frequently exceed
traditional company boundaries (Antonucci and Muehlen,
2000). Without an appreciation of a company’s internal
business processes and workflow, it is especially difficult
A business process perspective dictates that students also
be exposed to an enterprise-level view of data flows that
correspond to these processes (Gelinas et al, 2004). While
published case studies (e.g., Brown and Vessey, 2003;
Volkoff, 2003), process models, and data flow diagrams
give students a theoretical overview of a process, it is the
authors’ collective experience that students gain a better
understanding of the real workings of a business through
personal interaction and hands-on exercises.
Large-scale enterprise systems (ES) are well-suited to
support the hands-on component of a business curriculum.
There are two compelling reasons for this. First, the
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complexity of large-scale ES such as SAP, Oracle
Applications, or PeopleSoft, exposes students to the
elaborate interdependencies involved in running a large
business (Joseph and George, 2003). No amount of
textbook explanation or case work can impart this message
as well as personal interaction with such a system.
Alternatively, coursework based on a single-user, easy-touse ES downplays the critical role of technology in
managing typical business complexity and supporting
complicated intra- and interorganizational relationships.
The second reason for integrating a large-scale ES across
the curriculum is to imbue in students a deeper appreciation
for the capabilities of ES than can be gained through
readings, class lectures or discussion. Graduates who have
first-hand familiarity with an ES become new employees
who have a better understanding about any ES their hiring
firm uses. If our educational goal is to equip students with
knowledge and skills that match the needs of today’s
business environment, we as faculty must incorporate ES
technology that closely replicates the processes and
interactions students will encounter as they begin and
advance in their careers.
were learned about projects of this sort, scope, and size.
First, they cost more than ever imagined. Second, they take
longer than ever imagined. Third, they take more effort
than ever imagined.” The implementation at our college is
well represented by this quote. We note that many of our
initial successes and failures parallel similar efforts
observed at other adopting colleges and universities.
Our college became a member of the SAP University
Alliance (UA) and faculty began to work with SAP R/3 in
Spring of 1997. A number of trial-and-error attempts at
incorporating R/3 exercises into business courses followed
(Fedorowicz et al., 2004).
Rather than provide a
chronology of our successes and failures, we offer twelve
suggestions for how faculty at other colleges and
universities might adapt our experiences to their own
curriculum. These suggestions are oriented around three
themes: curriculum and implementation issues, training and
outside support, and student and faculty issues. Table 1
summarizes our themes and tips. Although we have yet to
meet our ultimate objective of integrating SAP into all
business disciplines, our success has been steady and
incremental. Our goal in this article is to share our
knowledge with our academic colleagues so they may be
able to move up the learning curve more quickly.
Many colleges and universities have recognized the value
of student ES experience. However, along with curricular
benefit come integration challenges (Guthrie and Guthrie,
2000). Unlike some other recent technology innovations
(e.g., distance learning, groupware, and Internet-based
search tools), true integration of ES in a course will alter
course content as well as pedagogy. It is especially
beneficial when ES issues are intertwined with the content
of business courses so students gain a full appreciation of
the true impact of such systems on organizations
(Fedorowicz, et al., 2005).
3. CURRICULUM AND IMPLEMENTATION ISSUES
3.1 Tip 1: Go with What You Know
From the onset of the UA, SAP offered extensive training
programs through its regional facilities. Faculty were
encouraged to attend scheduled training programs to
acquire a working knowledge of the modules they wanted
to use in their own courses. These training programs would
seem to be a good source of hands-on material for quick
inclusion into existing courses. Unfortunately, that was not
the case.
The purpose of this article is to provide guidance to faculty
on ways to effectively integrate ES across the business
curriculum in such a way as to accomplish the synergistic
goals of (1) illustrating real-world business processes and
(2) exposing students to the caliber of technology with
which they will work in their careers. To do so, we offer
twelve tips on how to support both the content and
pedagogical challenges of ES integration. In the next
section we describe our philosophy of learning from our
efforts and those of others. We then describe our twelve
tips in three categories or themes. The article concludes
with an appeal for research on the inherent value of ES
integration for classroom learning and career success.
The training courses offered by vendors like SAP are
designed for their corporate customers to point out the
major features of each module and to help users navigate
the system for a role-specific purpose. In addition, these
courses are generic, in the sense that they are taught in the
same way and cover the same material whether offered in
Boston, Atlanta or Düsseldorf. This approach is necessary
so a global company like SAP can provide the same
training experience to all of its customers all over the
world.1 But just as many corporate customers want training
on the system to be customized to reflect their unique
circumstances and processes (Wheatley, 2002), a
university-based instructor might expect similar tailoring.
However, they find that they cannot take SAP training
exercises and just drop them into a college course.
Exercises must be redesigned and augmented to reflect
course content and objectives.
2. LEARN FROM THE MISTAKES AND
SUCCESSES OF OTHERS
Many business schools have acquired an ES with the
intention of incorporating the system into new and existing
courses. Their efforts have met with a range of success.
What is clear from published accounts of these efforts is
that ES integration is harder than expected (Fedorowicz et
al, 2004; Farrell, 2001). Hensel and Alexander (2000, p. 6)
summarized learnings from their project that might easily
be applied to any curricular ES effort: “Three major lessons
Our first few efforts to integrate SAP into our courses were
faculty demonstrations and student exercises that mainly
involved the extraction of data from the IDES database that
is provided with SAP installations at academic institutions.2
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Attempts were also made to replicate exercises that faculty
had completed in the courses that they took at SAP training
centers. However, these approaches exhibited limited
success for two reasons. First, the IDES database that the
faculty members were using on campus did not contain the
same data as the database at the SAP training centers,
which had been specially configured for the training course
exercises. Second, these exercises appeared to be “out-ofcontext” for the students because they could not appreciate
how the data had come to be in the system, nor did they
fully understand the business activities represented by the
system.
through the efforts of one or a small number of faculty
champions. To be truly successful in reaching across a
curriculum, these champions must bring other faculty on
board who are willing to teach about the impacts of ES in a
broad spectrum of courses and disciplines. This necessitates
familiarizing colleagues with a topic about which they may
have little prior knowledge or interest. It will also require
champions to accept the lead in developing and
coordinating course materials. Champions do their best to
encourage faculty to attend these workshops and to
integrate SAP into their courses. In the end, each faculty
member must decide how to respond.
To solve both problems we developed our own set of
exercises to execute the transactions that make up basic
business processes. The extensive exercise sequences cover
the creation of records and entry of transactions for two
specific business processes: the order-to-cash process and
the purchase-to-pay process. Detailed instructions are given
to the students to help them to complete these exercises.
Our philosophy is to make the data entry steps as
straightforward as possible while emphasizing the learning
that can be gained through their descriptions and analysis
of the steps that they are performing.
In our case, we developed the exercises described in Tip 1
as a “proof of concept” to promote SAP integration into a
few initial courses. Once our initial exercises were in use in
the classroom, we designed workshops around each one.
Two day-long faculty workshops were created. The first
includes an introduction to SAP and the order-to-cash
process. The second focuses on the purchase-to-pay
process. The faculty member presenting these workshops
shares his PowerPoint slides, which include adaptations of
SAP training materials and some SAP screen shots, to
describe the SAP system. After each major element,
workshop attendees complete related exercises. At several
points during the workshops there is discussion about how
to use the SAP system in the faculty members’ courses.
Discussions cover how to use SAP effectively in a variety
of courses and also how to coordinate SAP coverage
among courses and majors.
These exercises solved our two problems. We do not need
to rely on the data in the IDES database because the
students create the master data and generate transactions as
part of the exercises. For example, they buy goods using an
inventory record that they create and they sell them to the
customer whose record they also create. Second, as the
students work through the steps in these exercises, they
begin to picture the process flow. In the order-to-cash cycle
exercises, they create a sales order to represent a sale; they
create an outbound delivery, record the picking of the
order, and post the goods issue (shipment) to represent
preparing and shipping the goods to the customer; they
create a billing document; and finally they process the
customer’s incoming payment for the goods sold.3
These workshops illustrate the benefit of having campus
experts or advocates leading efforts to diffuse ES into the
courses of a broad spectrum of faculty. By providing
exercises that are known to work in the campus
environment, the more experienced users among the faculty
spare less experienced faculty users the frustration of
creating new exercises with inadequate knowledge of the
underlying SAP infrastructure. In addition, the student
experience is enhanced since the exercises have common
themes that build a cohesive set of skills while minimizing
topical overlap across courses.
As the students complete each exercise, they are asked
questions comparing their actions to textbook material.
They are also asked to analyze their activity based on
course learning objectives. For example, learning
objectives around process documentation and internal
control evaluation would be reinforced in an Accounting
Information Systems course by having the students create a
flowchart of the process represented by the SAP activities
and then compare their representation to an illustration in
the text for a comparable process. They also identify
actions that act as controls on the process and evaluate the
quality of the controls inherent in SAP functionality. These
types of assignments give the students a close look at the
details and complexity of SAP as well as asking them to
step back and understand what they did and why they did it.
These exercises force students to consider both “the forest
and the trees” of hands-on work.
3.3 Tip 3: Get it Straight From the Horse’s Mouth
Although not unique to the topic of enterprise systems, an
invitation to local practitioners to speak to a class is one of
the most powerful and easy ways to expose students to the
realities of ES. As early as 1997, our faculty invited a
number of individuals from well-known local companies to
speak to classes on ES topics. The CIO of a large
manufacturer spoke about how and why his company
selected their ES vendor, and described the significant and
painful, yet successful and beneficial, business process
changes that the ES forced upon them. Professionals from a
variety of consulting firms spoke on the differences among
leading products, the role of external consultants in the
implementation process, and how ES expertise can be
outsourced to professional service firms. Business process
owners spoke of their role in configuring an ES and how
the system is used to support their particular business
3.2 Tip 2: Practice Knowledge Diffusion
Enterprise systems are usually brought onto campus
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process. Other external speakers covered a range of
specialized topics within several courses.
These workshops are mostly offered in the summer and
during winter break and are held in a number of US
locations as well as Nova Scotia, Canada. Several formats
are used to deliver the courses. Most are comprised of a
modified SAP training course augmented by faculty led
discussions about how the material might be used. All
workshops are available to faculty from schools who have
joined the UA and are offered free of charge.
In addition to adding credibility and raising the level of
importance of ES as a course topic, these speakers give
faculty an added stable of stories to enhance future class
discussion. As will be seen in other tips, these are also
invaluable contacts to aid faculty in more challenging and
innovative course material development.
There are, however, challenges associated with this new
approach. First, the workshops are either one or two weeks
long. This means that the faculty’s institution must pay for
travel and lodging for any faculty who attend the workshop.
The faculty member must also commit to one or two full
weeks of training, rather than a few days.
3.4 Tip 4: Don’t Re-invent the Wheel or Make Others
do the Same
Within your own college, there is no better motivation for
sharing ideas than to reduce the investment of time and the
frustration level of those who create their own SAP
exercises. Faculty must be open to sharing exercises and
assignments they have created or adapted from existing
exercises, with other faculty who might find them relevant.
There are usually several offerings during each training
week, so several faculty may attend from an individual
institution and each take different courses. The choice of
faculty and the courses they take should be made
judiciously (Becerra-Fernandez et al., 2000). The goals
should be to make sure faculty receive the “right” level of
training, and that the college’s needs are being met without
unnecessary duplication. We have found that it is most
beneficial to support faculty attending these workshop who
are most likely to a) incorporate what they have learned
into one of their courses in the near-term and b) be willing
and able to present what they have learned to other faculty.
The same concept applies across institutions as well. In the
past few years, there has been more widespread adoption of
SAP in various parts of business and information systems
curricula. There are many exercises available through the
UA or through personal contacts made at workshops or
meetings. For example, the UA sponsors a website named
Innovation Watch for its members on which it has posted
exercises and materials created by its “Plug and Play” grant
recipients. Several of the academic business conferences
also have tracks that include ERP curriculum ideas (for
example, ISECON (Information Systems Education
Conference), the Decision Sciences Institute conference,
and the American Accounting Association conferences).
Faculty are encouraged to share their own exercises and
curriculum ideas through such outlets. Since there is now a
critical mass of colleges using SAP in their curricula, but
no established body of academic texts to support such
integration, sharing proven materials with others looking
for specific applications benefits everyone.
4.2 Tip 6: Outsource Non-Core Competencies
In the first years of the UA program, all of its members
were ‘self-hosted’. This meant that each school had to
devote substantial resources to installing and maintaining
their own instance of R/3. Appropriate servers had to be
acquired, technical staff had to be trained on how to
manage the system and had to devote part or all of their
time to SAP issues, and outside consultants were hired by
many schools to help maintain the system at acceptable
levels of effectiveness and efficiency. This made an SAP
initiative quite expensive. This level of effort was
especially burdensome for schools that did not have the
participation of their information systems department. In
many successful SAP initiatives, information systems
students and faculty have been instrumental in maintaining
the system (Joseph and George, 2003; Corbitt and
Mensching, 2000). In addition, many schools found that
after their technical staff had been trained and received
some experience with the system, they were hired away by
local companies who were able to offer higher salaries than
the school could afford.
4. TRAINING AND OUTSIDE SUPPORT
4.1 TIP 5: New Training Approach, New Training
Challenges
Fortunately, SAP’s UA program has evolved the training
process to make it easier for faculty to get the materials and
help they need to more efficiently adapt training materials
to their courses. Beginning in the summer of 2001, the UA
began offering workshops that were specifically designed
for faculty. These include courses such as an overview of
the system with hands-on activities and curriculum
materials to introduce faculty to R/3, a two week Business
Process Integration course that offers a more in-depth
understanding of how SAP works and supports business
processes, a number of courses on the basic R/3 modules
(accounting, materials management, production, etc.),
courses on the Business Information Warehouse (BW) and
more on SAP’s mySAP Products (Strategic Enterprise
Management [SEM], Customer Relationship Management
[CRM], etc.)
To get around these difficulties, the UA began to develop a
technical support program in which any school’s SAP
initiative could be hosted by a ‘University Competency
Center’ (UCC). Today, there are five UCCs across the
United States. Each UCC has all of the SAP software
supported by the UA. Member institutions register and use
the subset of the software that they need for their classes
and for which they have licenses. The UCC provides access
to SAP software (via the Internet) for use by the member
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module that surveys the subject of logical access security is
probably within the capability of most faculty members
who teach IT Auditing. However, complementing that
module with hands-on exercises, especially those that
involve accessing data from a large-scale ES, is beyond the
reach of most auditing faculty. We have found that
collaboration with industry experts can be quite helpful in
such cases.
institution, conducts regular system maintenance, creates
student accounts, and staffs a faculty help desk. However,
member institutions are responsible for their own exercises,
course materials, and help for their students.
SAP will no longer allow new members to host their own
SAP installations. All institutions that are new to the UA
program must join a UCC.
One faculty member collaborated with the SAP systems
administrator at a local company to create a curriculum
module for the IT Auditing course. Working closely
together, they developed a module that included a class
presentation by the systems administrator on the subject of
logical access security. This presentation was followed by a
hands-on workshop and the assignment of exercises that
asked the students to create user accounts and user profiles,
assign the profiles to the users, and test those accounts and
profiles to determine that the desired level of access control
had been achieved. The corporate partner also benefits
from this type of arrangement. The company received
positive exposure to potential new hires in the IT Audit
classes. The SAP systems administrator benefited as she
was able to achieve one of her professional growth goals by
developing and delivering the class presentation. Other
SAP exercises for the IT Auditing courses have been
created with the assistance of staff from the local offices of
the Big Four.
4.3 Tip 7: Develop and Maintain Helpful Relationships
As faculty take more training in SAP’s products and
become more familiar with the system, they will develop an
understanding of the system’s logic and will be able to
extend their exercises, solve many of their own problems,
and respond to error messages from the system. But they
will still need assistance, from time to time, to solve errors
in exercises and to obtain inspiration as to what exercises to
develop. We have found it very helpful to develop
relationships with SAP trainers, more seasoned faculty in
the UA program,4 and with local expert users in firms that
use R/3.
SAP trainers are a tremendous resource to cultivate. They
can help with customizing data and assignments, with
responses to system error messages, and by providing the
codes and steps needed to compile and write certain
standard reports. Knowing who has what expertise is
critical to obtaining a timely response to a question or
problem. Trainers have been willing to help when given
well specified questions in their specific training domain.
Because SAP trainers conduct the UA faculty workshops, it
is still possible to forge these relationships.
Outside expertise is widespread in local industry.
Companies are eager to consult with faculty on developing
realistic hands-on exercises because they are aware that
students in these classes will then be better prepared as
potential employees. Companies are very open to working
with faculty to ensure that students receive a broad and
accurate exposure to current approaches to working in their
area of expertise. A major benefit of this interaction is that
class exercises augment and update standard textbook
treatments that often depict stovepiped working
arrangements.
Local business people have expressed great interest in our
use of R/3 in classes, predominantly for what it is providing
their potential future employees. The side benefit of their
interest is that they are willing to offer their expertise and
time for relevant problems or issues that may be hampering
our efforts to integrate SAP successfully. These experts are
invaluable for their input into what kinds of exercises
would be most relevant to the students in light of what is
done in business today. Membership in the regional ASUG
(SAP Users Group) is very useful for establishing
relationships with local experts.
5. STUDENT AND FACULTY RELATED ISSUES
5.1 Tip 9: Have Realistic Expectations
Integrating SAP into business classes is ambitious for two
reasons. First, many faculty who teach traditional business
disciplines, such as accounting and finance, do not typically
have the IT training or background common to information
systems faculty. Second, students majoring in accounting
and finance may not be inclined in general toward hands-on
IT assignments. Both faculty and students, however, must
accept that career paths in these traditional business
disciplines are inevitably entwined with information
systems in organizations.
Our Office of Corporate Relations has been helpful in
identifying and nurturing these corporate contacts. These
relations may start with a meeting among the university
Office of Corporate Relations, faculty, and, from the
organization, recruiters, and representatives from IT,
supply chain, and enterprise systems. The next step is often
to identify speakers for classes and student organizations.
Organizations with alumni, who have or will be recruiting
students, and those organizations who foster community
service and outreach will be most helpful.
Once a school decides to integrate SAP in their curriculum,
it is wise to start with the small group of champions who
are enthusiastic about learning, and then teaching with
SAP. They should start with simple exercises at first,
incrementally increasing the extent and depth of what they
4.4 Tip 8: Ask for Help
Creating and implementing SAP course modules that go
beyond the basic business processes can be a challenge for
most faculty.5 For example, creating and implementing a
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do, and how they integrate it. At first, one cost accounting
professor in our group used the same exercise material that
others were using around the order to cash cycle, and
focused on the reports that could be derived from the
activities, and how they could be used to support
management decisions. In subsequent semesters, however,
she developed a more comprehensive assignment around
cost center exercises that could be more meaningfully
integrated into the cost management concepts of the course.
Careful planning and incremental development assured that
there has been steady forward progress in the appropriate
use of SAP in the course.
allowing unlimited choices in others. This frustrates
students while exposing them to real-world experiences.
Intense scrutiny of SAP’s foibles also diverts student
attention from gaining a “systems” level exposure to ES by
focusing on minutiae and details. This is why assignments
must be more than keystroke exercises, and need to be
carefully tied to learning objectives.
5. 3 Tip 11: Provide Good Customer Support
Any faculty member who incorporates a hands-on SAP
assignment (or any technology related assignment) into his
or her course should be prepared to provide a high level of
support to students. Unlike traditional homework problems,
a student who runs into a problem in an SAP assignment
may literally not be able to go further. For example, if the
student receives an error message that posting (i.e.,
completing a transaction) is not allowed in the current
period, it could be because the posting period has not been
opened yet.6 The faculty member who gets an angry e-mail
from a student that something has happened must be
prepared to address the issue immediately.
In addition to having realistic expectations about what
adopting faculty and their students can do with SAP in the
short term, a college should be realistic about how
prominent SAP can be across the curriculum. There will be
faculty who do not embrace the notion of learning a new
technology, let alone changing their syllabus to
accommodate a hands-on assignment. If faculty are forced
to adopt SAP, the result can backfire. If students perceive a
time-intensive assignment to be not fully supported by their
instructor, or find that their faculty member cannot help
them with the assignment, the students will become very
frustrated, and maybe even hostile toward the application.
This then has a negative effect in subsequent classes where
they may also have an SAP assignment, and also on their
overall view of SAP and ES when they start working. It is
better for students to not have the exposure to the software
than to have them experience it in a way that taints their
view of this and perhaps other technology that is prevalent
in and beneficial to many business organizations.
SAP exercises can be very frustrating for students who are
not familiar with the complexity (and rigidity) of such a
system. Many students make what they consider to be a
small mistake from which they can sometimes not recover.
The faculty must emphasize that things have to be done in
an exact way to make sure the appropriate data are entered
in the right place, and in the right format. If the faculty
member catches a student’s mistake early, he or she can
usually provide a solution (or workaround) to prevent
future major problems. This requires however, that the
students contact the faculty member when they have a
problem, and that the faculty member responds in a timely
way to rectify the matter.
5. 2 Tip 10: Let Students Learn from Their Mistakes
Students may feel anxious about doing an SAP assignment,
because they are not sure if they have the “right” answer.
They may not comprehend exactly what they are trying to
accomplish in the system. Some faculty have found it
useful to give students check figures for an assignment. For
example, for a cost center accounting assignment, the
professor provided a spreadsheet that indicated the entries,
adjustments, and final balances for each cost center. If
students did make mistakes, they would not obtain the same
numbers as the professor indicated. Rather than take points
off because of having a wrong number, the instructor
decided to use the students’ mistakes to their advantage. If
a student could figure out what he or she had done wrong,
and why his or her number was different from the number
on the solution spreadsheet, the student could still get full
credit by explaining why the number was different. This
approach results in the student learning much more about
the system than if he or she had followed the directions
perfectly and had arrived at the “right” answer. It takes the
focus off the navigation and keystrokes and places it more
on understanding how the system works.
There are many ways to support students to minimize their
frustration, and limit the time demands on the faculty. If the
college has the resources, a graduate student with some
SAP experience can be used to provide assistance to other
students during established SAP help hours. Our college
has an accounting learning lab where a graduate student is
available during certain times during the week for students
in any major to come in for SAP help.
Another approach is to use a discussion board (our faculty
use Blackboard to support our courses on-line) to allow
students to post questions so the faculty member can
answer the question there, rather than answering individual
e-mails from students that may contain the same questions
over and over. That way all students have access to the
information in a timely way. McCombs and Sharifi
(2002/2003) describe a similar approach using an on-line
forum for students to make comments and ask or answer
questions. They award students credit for contributing to
the forum, and plan to use the content of the forum to build
a knowledge base to be used in subsequent classes.
Many traditional homework assignments have “correct”
answers and methods of solution. SAP assignments
demonstrate the many alternatives open to its users by
strictly limiting acceptable input in some cases and by
The key here is to provide support to the students in a way
that is accessible, reliable, and useful. If students feel like
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picture of how the business processes and the SAP system
fit together. It is used in a number of courses that cover
business processes, including Accounting Information
Systems, where the focus is on understanding business
process, internal controls within business processes, and the
role of enterprise systems in supporting the process and its
control requirements. It is also used in the required
Business Process course in the MBA curriculum. Similar to
those in the AIS course, the MBA students focus on
understanding business processes and the role of enterprise
systems in supporting those processes. In addition, the
MBA instructors engage their students in discussions of
business process reengineering and matching as-is and tobe business processes with the features of the enterprise
system.
they have nowhere to turn when they are having problems,
they are likely to respond with ill feelings toward the
software, and toward the faculty member who gave them
the SAP assignment. It is most beneficial to give the
students strategies for trying to diagnose and fix their own
problems. Showing the students how to generate relevant
reports can help them determine if they have the right
information in the system. They also should use the
“display” functionality after they have “created” a master
record or transaction. More significant learning takes place
if the students can spend some time analyzing what they
did, detect what was wrong with it, and correct it
themselves.
5. 4 Tip 12: But What Does it Really Look Like?
One of the programmatic goals of a business curriculum
should be to impart a basic understanding of common
business processes. Enterprise systems enforce this
understanding when they are used to illustrate the flow of
information and goods throughout the business. However,
these systems are inevitably complex and complicated to
learn, so the typical student finds it difficult to “see the
forest for the trees” when completing even basic business
actions within the software. As a result, a common
complaint among student users is that they do not see how
a particular hands-on exercise relates to what they are
learning about operations, or accounting, or information
systems, in their coursework.
6. CONCLUSIONS AND A CALL FOR RESEARCH
Enterprise system integration is heavily time and resourceconsuming, and is a source of great frustration on the part
of faculty and students alike. Our purpose in compiling
these tips is to provide guidance to those struggling with
the challenges these efforts portend. When successful, the
effort greatly improves the content and pedagogy of a
business education. Students gain a better understanding of
the true nature of business processes, and come away with
a concrete skill that has immediate benefit in their initial
jobs.
Industry has responded very favorably to the programs in
which we have integrated SAP, both in terms of providing
support and in wanting to hire our students. In return for
their help, companies gain entry level employees with
considerable enterprise system awareness. This presents a
win-win situation for faculty who make the effort to reach
out to these corporate partners, as we benefit from their
SAP expertise, and they benefit from having a more
sophisticated labor pool from which they can recruit.
To counter this problem, we approached an international
company with local headquarters to help us create a video
of how SAP R/3 is used in a common business process at
their firm. We interviewed a number of employees at a
large distribution center, filming employee interviews as
well as product workflow to demonstrate how products are
acquired, warehoused, sold, and shipped. The video shows
details of the business activities performed at the
distribution center which included receiving inventory,
quality inspection, placing goods in bulk storage, moving
goods to forward picking, receiving and input of customer
orders, picking goods, packing and shipment, and finally
loading of shipments by FEDEX. At each step, the
corresponding procedures in SAP are described and the
relevant SAP screens are displayed. The video depicts the
entry of data, the printing of documents, and the audit trail
of data that is stored by the SAP system.7
Much remains to be learned about the extent of the impact
of ES integration in a curriculum. Little research has been
published that measures the effects on student
understanding of course material and their broader
knowledge of business issues. Employers, career services
and placement offices would benefit from knowing if and
how much this coverage affects employment opportunities
and pay scales. Other issues related to best practices in
teaching methods and learning assessment are open to
study. As we continue to learn more about improving
student education around ES, we urge our colleagues to use
the opportunity to conduct field and experimental research
to measure the true benefits of our work in this area.
Creating a video to provide an essential tie-in to the real
world is not a huge undertaking. In this case, the video was
produced by faculty with no prior video production
experience, with assistance from campus video support
staff. Filming at the site took less than two days, with most
of the filming completed in one full day. Video support
staff then edited the material down to twenty minutes. The
video was made in VHS format for classroom use, or could
be viewed through a link over Blackboard for outside-ofclass viewing.
7. REFERENCES
Antonucci, Y. L. and Muehlen, M. Z. “Developing An
International Business to Business Process Curriculum:
Extending the Classroom Walls with ERP Software,” in
The Proceedings of ISECON 2000, Philadelphia, Vol.
The video has been tremendously successful in the
classroom. For both faculty and students, it completes the
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3
17, §121. Retrieved May 13, 2004, from
http://isedj.org/isecon/2000/121/index.html
Becerra-Fernandez, I., Murphy, K. E., and Simon, S. J.,
“Integrating ERP in the Business School Curriculum,”
Communications of the ACM, Vol. 43, No. 4, 2000, pp.
39-41.
Brown, C. V. and Vessey, I., “Managing the Next Wave of
Enterprise Systems: Leveraging Lessons from ERP,”
MIS Quarterly Executive, Vol. 2, No. 1, 2003, pp. 65-77.
Corbitt, G., and Mensching, J. “Integrating SAP R/3 into a
College of Business Curriculum: Lessons Learned,”
Information Technology and Management, Vol. 1, No. 4,
2000, pp. 247-258.
Farrell, T., “The PeopleSoft On Campus Program
Implementation Into
an Information Systems
Curriculum,” in The Proceedings of ISECON 2001,
Cincinnati, Vol. 18, §18a. Retrieved May 13, 2004, from
http://isedj.org/isecon/2001/18a/index.html
Fedorowicz, J., Gelinas, U. J., Jr., Hachey, G. and Usoff, C.
“Integrating SAP Across the Business Curriculum,” in
Managing Business with SAP: Planning, Implementation
and Evaluation, L. K. Lau (ed.), Idea Group Publishing,
2005, pp. 44-62.
Gelinas, U. J., Jr., Sutton, S. G., and Fedorowicz, J.
Business Processes and Information Technology,
Thomson Southwestern Publishing, Mason, Ohio, 2004.
Guthrie, R. W. and Guthrie, R. A. “Integration of
Enterprise System Software in the Undergraduate
Curriculum,” in The Proceedings of ISECON 2000,
Philadelphia, Vol. 17, §301. Retrieved May 13, 2004,
from http://isedj.org/isecon/2000/301/index.html
Hensel, M. and Alexander, B. “Using Industry
Partnerships, Corporate Donations, and Grants to Create
an ERP Program,” Proceedings of ISECON 2000,
Philadelphia, Vol. 17, §300. Retrieved May 13, 2004,
from http://isedj.org/isecon/2000/300/index.html
Joseph, G. and George, A., “ERP, Learning Communities,
and Curriculum Integration,” Journal of Information
Systems Education, Vol. 13, No. 1, 2002, pp. 51-58.
McCombs, G. B., and Sharifi, M., “Design and
Implementation of an ERP Oracle Financials Course,”
The Journal of Computer Information Systems, Vol. 43,
No. 2, Winter 2002/03, pp. 71-75.
Volkoff, O., “Configuring an ERP System: Introducing
Best Practices or Hampering Flexibility?,” Journal of
Information Systems Education, Vol. 14, No. 3, 2003,
pp. 319-324.
Wheatley, M. “Training: ERP’s Achilles’ Heel,” The ERP
Lifecycle: Planning, Execution and Post-Implementation,
CXO Media, Framingham, MA, 2002, pp. 23-26.
The instructor needs to make it clear that in a real-life
situation, different people complete each step in a process
(i.e., sales clerks do not execute shipments or create billing
documents).
4
See tips 2, 4, and 5.
5
Adjunct faculty currently working in industry, or those
full-time faculty with recent industry experience, may have
the relevant experience.
6
A posting period equates to an accounting period. SAP
only allows transactions to be posted in one open period,
typically a month. As a result, the instructor or system
support staff needs to close the period at the end of each
month so that students are able to enter transaction data on
the first day of a new month. This is the type of system
maintenance performed by UCC staff.
7
The video is available for nonprofit, educational use. For
a copy, please send your contact information to Joe Gelinas
at ugelinas@bentley.edu.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES
Jane Fedorowicz, the Rae D. Anderson Chair of
Accounting and Information Systems,
holds a joint appointment in the
Accountancy and Computer Information
Systems departments at Bentley
College. Professor Fedorowicz earned
MS and PhD degrees in Systems
Sciences from Carnegie Mellon
University. She currently serves as
principal investigator of the Bentley Invision Project, a
team of seven researchers examining the expected and
unintended impacts of interorganizational information
sharing and the coordination infrastructures supporting
these relationships. Professor Fedorowicz has published
over 70 articles in refereed journals and conference
proceedings, including Communications of AIS,
Communications of the ACM, Decision Support Systems,
Decision Sciences, Information and Management, Journal
of Information Systems, Journal of Management
Information Systems, and many others. The American
Accounting Association recognized Professor Fedorowicz
with the 1997 Notable Contribution to the Information
Systems Literature Award, and she was selected as Bentley
College’s Scholar of the Year for 2000.
Ulric J. (Joe) Gelinas, Jr., is an Associate Professor of
Accounting at Bentley College. He
received his M.B.A. and Ph.D.
degrees from the University of
Massachusetts. He is co-author of
Accounting Information Systems, 6th
ed.,
Business
Processes
and
Information
Technology,
and
founding editor of the Journal of
Accounting and Computers. He participated in the
development of Control Objectives for Information and
Related Technology (COBIT) by participating in the
COBIT Expert Review and by authoring portions of the
8. ENDNOTES
1
Attributed to an SAP trainer.
The IDES database is a partially populated sample
database used in SAP training classes. It may also be
included in any installation, should the purchasing
organization want a “sandbox” for testing and training.
Specially configured versions of the IDES database are
used in courses conducted at SAP training centers.
2
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Journal of Information Systems Education, Vol. 15(3)
Implementation Tool Set. He is a recipient of the Innovation
in Auditing and Assurance Education Award from the
American Accounting Association. Dr. Gelinas has
published articles and case studies in Issues in Accounting
Education, Information Systems Audit & Control Journal,
Technical Communications Quarterly, IEEE Transactions
on Professional Communication, Annals of Cases on
Information Technology and other outlets.
George A. Hachey Jr. is an Associate Professor of
Finance at Bentley College. He
received an M.B.A. from the
University of Rhode Island and a
Ph.D. from the University of New
Hampshire.
He
is
currently
developing interdisciplinary business
courses and implementing enterprise
software such as SAP into Bentley’s
finance curriculum. Hachey is campus coordinator for
SAP’s University Alliances Program. His principle
teaching interest is in Performance Measurement and
Evaluation, the capstone course in the Corporate Finance
and Accounting major that he co-developed with Dr.
Catherine Usoff. He was formerly academic coordinator for
Bentley’s Estonia Program which received substantial
financial support from USAID and USIA. He also
developed Bentley’s International Relations major. Hachey
has authored various articles on capital markets and
international finance with particular emphasis on the
Eurocurrency market and financial futures. He has
published in the Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, the
Journal of International Money and Finance, Business and
the Contemporary World, and the Journal of Real Estate,
Finance and Economics. He has participated in Executive
Education Programs for Shaw’s Supermarkets and
Hannaford Brothers Supermarkets.
Catherine A. Usoff is an associate professor of Accounting
at Bentley College. She earned her MBA and PhD degrees
from The Ohio State University. Her teaching interests are
in business processes and cost
management. She has co-authored a
book on audit task characteristics, and
done research in auditor behavior and
decision making, accounting education,
and inter-organizational information
sharing and associated infrastructure.
Her publications include a chapter in
Managing Business with SAP, and articles in Managerial
Auditing Journal, International Journal of Intelligent
Systems in Accounting, Finance, and Management,
Advances in Accounting Education, and Journal of
Education for Business. She has presented her research at
several national and regional academic conferences.
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Journal of Information Systems Education, Vol. 15(3)
Table 1: Summary of Three Themes and Twelve Tips for Integrating an Enterprise System into the Business
Curriculum
THEME 1: CURRICULUM ISSUES
Tip 1: Go With What You Know
Adapt SAP training exercises that are meant for targeted corporate users, to make them appropriate for business
education.
Tip 2: Practice Knowledge Diffusion
Have campus experts present materials to other faculty and allow discussion about how the exercises can be used in
different parts of the curriculum.
Tip 3: Get It Straight From the Horse’s Mouth
Invite local speakers to talk about their SAP experience, lending credibility and substance to your curriculum efforts.
Tip 4: Don’t Re-Invent the Wheel or Make Others Do the Same
Use exercises written by others, and make your exercises available to others.
THEME 2: TRAINING AND OUTSIDE SUPPORT
Tip 5: New Training Approach, New Training Challenges
Take advantage of the faculty workshops which comprise SAP’s new training approach for University Alliance
members, but use your resources and time wisely.
Tip 6: Outsource Non-Core Competencies
Use a UCC to host your application so you don’t need to worry about the technical issues and can focus on the
curriculum issues.
Tip 7: Develop And Maintain Helpful Relationships
Build a network of SAP experts among trainers and corporate people.
Tip 8: Ask For Help
Ask an expert for help in designing an appropriate assignment, to make the use of SAP most relevant for particular
courses.
THEME 3: STUDENT AND FACULTY RELATED ISSUES
Tip 9: Have Realistic Expectations
Don’t try to do too much too fast, or expect everyone to embrace curriculum integration of SAP.
Tip 10: Let Students Learn From Their Mistakes
Help students to think about what they are doing by not focusing so much on getting the right answer as understanding
what they may have done incorrectly.
Tip 11: Provide Good Customer Support
Be available to help students struggling with their SAP assignments.
Tip 12: But What Does It Really Look Like?
Create and use visual aids to help students understand how SAP relates to real business activities.
244
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