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

The most obvious learning need in adoption of an ERP system is for end users to acquire operational capability with the software. This is the focus of most vendor-supplied training courses: how to manipulate the software and perform transactions. Training usually consists of keyboarding exercises with progression to relatively clear-cut problem solving assignments. This is a necessary but not sufficient way to acquire competence as a user. The celebrated CIO Magazine cover story proclaiming that "ERP Training Stinks" (Wheatley, 2000) captures the feelings of many firms regarding the relative costs and benefits of ERP training. The problem is that operational training enables users to navigate in some areas of the system and execute tasks but provides no understanding of why the tasks are being performed. ERP training manuals focus on step by step instruction on task completion, not on business process logic (cf. Scott and Sugar, 2004). Employers consider that ERP training has limited value unless it enables the user to understand information flows and business processes (Wheatly, 2000). Without the ability to relate the operational task to a business process that connects various points in the firm in order to produce value, users have difficulty correcting errors or understanding how their own work affects others. Unfortunately, the literature on end-user training (reviewed by Niederman and Webster, 1998) says little about such process learning.

The distinction between ERP training and ERP education defines a division of labor between ERP software vendors and partners in the sphere of higher education. Universities or colleges may offer for-credit educational courses that use ERP as a platform, but they may not offer training courses leading to certification. This provision of the software licensing agreement protects an important revenue stream for vendors. The distinction between ERP training and education also allows universities to define their own educational product in terms of abstract, formal knowledge, as opposed to vocational training. However, the distinction between training and education as know-how versus knowwhy does not map easily onto enterprise systems curricula in universities, which display a wide range of learning methods and objectives and frequently include activities that are designed to convey operational know-how as well as management know-why. Training is often interpreted as development of technical skills (Mennel, 2002). Enterprise systems can be taught at a high level of abstraction; they can also be introduced into business curricula incrementally to provide different "levels of immersion" in the system (Guthrie and Guthrie, 2000). Finally, enterprise systems are objects of innovation in teaching methods, in matters of simulations for business process and process-oriented management learning, and in distance learning, and interuniversity collaboration (Antonucci and zur Muehlen, 2001; Noguira and Watson, 1999; Stewart et al., 2002; Shtub,2001),