Enterprise Integration in Business Education: Design and Outcomes of a Capstone ERP-based Undergraduate e-Business Management Course

Journal of Information Systems Education, Fall 2004 by Davis, Charles H, Comeau, Jana

ABSTRACT

This article describes the design, delivery, and outcomes of a course on enterprise integration at the senior undergraduate level in the e-business concentration in the University of New Brunswick's Faculty of Business. The course aims to provide education to the young business manager regarding the process of adoption and exploitation of an ERP or enterprise-wide software system. The course is deliberately "business-centric" rather than technology-oriented. It contains two streams: a management component based on readings and discussion, and a hands-on laboratory component in which students individually configure a firm. We evaluated students' performance in three areas: completion of a learning log containing literature summaries and reflections on individual learning, completion of configuration exercises on SAP R/3, and completion of a take-home business case.

We offer several suggestions to potential providers of enterprise integration education to business students. First, do not underestimate the considerable operational requirements of a lab-based ERP course. Second, because no business-oriented curriculum for enterprise integration business education is presently available on the market, teachers must be prepared to develop one. Third, students have very different learning needs with respect to ERP. The combination of hands-on lab learning and management learning via reading, discussions, and cases is very powerful but it is a challenge to balance the two streams and to relate the lab learnings with the management learnings.

Keywords: ERP, enterprise integration, e-business, business education, learning outcomes

1. INTRODUCTION

ERP systems are generic, packaged software systems that provide comprehensive functionality and business process integration across the firm (Davenport, 2000; Klaus et al., 2000). These enterprise-wide software systems offer significant potential benefits, as suggested by the growing scholarly literature that seeks to conceptualize and measure types of organizational outcomes, business impacts, and return on investment among ERP adopter firms (e.g. Hawking and Stein, 2004; Hitt et al., 2002; Hunton et al., 2003; Spathis and Constantinides, 2004; Staehr et al., 2002). However, the scholarly and trade literatures contain numerous accounts of the difficulties that firms face in justifying their decisions to implement integrated systems, in dealing with unanticipated side effects, and in learning to use these systems well enough to produce business value (see, for example, Gattiker and Goodhue, 2002; Granlund and Malmi, 2002; Hanseth et al., 2001 ; Kumar et al., 2003; and Oliver and Romm, 2002). The organizational learning curve is steep, and little is known about individual users' learning processes throughout the enterprise system adoption cycle. Unlike general computer skills, enterprise system user and management skills are not widely diffused in the working population. Firms express a great deal of frustration about the costs and modalities of learning to use ERP systems. Formal and informal training and learning processes are consistently identified as critical success factors in mastery of ERP systems (Amoako-Gyampah, 2004; Esteves and Pastor, 2001; Umble et al., 2003).

Interest in the use of information and communication technologies in business education has largely focused on applications of technology-mediated learning rather than on learning to use core business IT tools. Although private and public organizations incur significant costs in adopting enterprise-wide systems, they have not yet made strong enough or clear enough demands on educational establishments for the latter to routinely provide some level of ERP competence and understanding among their graduates. MIS students are sometimes exposed to ERP technology, but business students in other functional areas usually are not. When they are, they typically leam operational skills related to their functional area rather than acquire crossfunctional business process management understanding. Moreover, they are not provided an understanding of the larger set of management issues involved in adopting and exploiting enterprise-wide systems. ERP technology is relatively new to the business school curriculum. Bradford, Vijayaraman, and Chandra's (2003) survey of accounting and MIS professors (with responses primarily from U.S. universities) showed that 37 percent of 94 responding business schools had brought enterprise systems into their curricula, although fewer than one-third of these teach a complete enterprise system module or cross-functional business topics involving more than one module.

The question of how and why core business technologies should be integrated into the business curriculum, and which capabilities should persons other than information systems specialists acquire in respect of business technologies, has not been thoroughly addressed. Most employers of business school graduates do not seem to have yet made a connection between the very high learning costs that firms incur when adopting advanced information technologies, including ERP systems, and the degree of IT-based business tool competence and comprehension of their new employees. But many factors militate against the adoption of complex business technologies in university business schools for teaching and learning purposes. These include the multidisciplinary scope of enterprise system concepts that requires internal cross-disciplinary coordination in curriculum design and course delivery; the concern that keyboarding and laboratory activities not supplant acquisition of management theory and principles; the cost and considerable operational complexity of delivering labbased learning with enterprise software; and retaining faculty members with ERP experience (Becerra-Fernandez et al., 2000; Corbitt and Mensching, 2000)..