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

We had previously taught undergraduate and MBA ebusiness courses with an enterprise integration focus. Our starting point in the design and delivery of the new capstone Enterprise Integration course was the observation, based on an extensive literature review and on field research with ERP-using organizations, that enterprise-wide systems are unusually complex business tools that cannot yield business without significant investment in time and energy on the part of adopter organizations. Our objective in this course was to prepare e-business graduates for ERP-enabled work environments as employees or managers by providing a conceptual framework and enough familiarity with an enterprise system to gain a sense of self-efficacy regarding use of the technology or management of users in a business environment, thereby improving learning efficiencies on the part of the adopter organization. Our Enterprise Integration course is designed to be a management-oriented course that follows the selection, implementation, and post-implementation cycle of enterprise system adoption. As a capstone course, Enterprise Integration completes our program's learning sequence by requiring the student to use previous learnings to address and solve business problems. The course has a management theory component and a lab component. In the theory component, the student learns how to manage the selection and deployment of ERP systems, with a focus on understanding the organizational processes and individual competencies required to take advantage of enterprise-wide software. The lab component seeks to expose students to the complexities of an ERP system by requiring them to configure their own company in an SAP R/3 environment. Overall, our Enterprise Integration course aims to provide a sound conceptual foundation regarding the adoption and effective use of ERP systems in firms; to provide examples so that the student may apply the concepts in real business situations; and to provide hands-on experience in configuring a firm with SAP R/3 software so that the student may understand and appreciate the modalities of achieving cross-functional software-based business process integration.

The course was team-taught in two sections to about twenty-five students. One of us took the lead on the management learning component and the other on the lab component. The course was delivered in three contact hours per week over a period of thirteen weeks. Ninety minutes were devoted to management theory and practice, and ninety minutes to hands-on laboratory learning on SAP R/3. We evaluated students' performance in three areas: completion of a take-home business case, completion of configuration exercises on SAP R/3, and completion of a learning log containing literature summaries and reflections on individual learning. The configuration exercises were completed twice: once in a learning environment and once in a testing environment. Students' performance in the lab was evaluated in terms of completion of assignments, not for functionality of the configuration. The learning logs were submitted weekly, and required the students to summarize their understanding of the issues presented in the week's readings, assess the relative importance of the information, present the learning challenges from the week's lab exercises, and submit questions.