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 Dolphin Group offers this course to SAP University Alliance members, and encourages faculty members who have undergone the suggested training to incorporate it into their curriculum. Training involves a ten-day workshop exposing faculty participants to the course by having them work through the entire program as students, and a separate five-day workshop in which the configuration of the clients and servers required to run the course are reviewed. The format of the training helps to reinforce some of the anticipated student user issues as faculty members struggle with the interface, logic and nomenclature of the system.

The Dolphin course encompasses the Financial, Controlling, Materials Management, Production Planning and Sales and Distribution modules of SAP R/3. Time constraints, unanticipated down time of the hosted application, and a restructuring of the lab curriculum limited the Enterprise Integration course offering to the first four modules. Students in the course completed the configuration of the first four modules twice, once in a learning environment and once in order to be tested. This approach was not originally planned, but was incorporated into the course delivery as it became clear that students were slow to grasp relationships among the business processes they were setting up.

Throughout the semester, it became increasingly apparent that some of the most trying issues related to teaching the principles of ERP using the Dolphin SAP Implementation course arose at the operational level, involving the system as well as individual users. The operational issues can be broken down into four broad categories: set-up and teaching issues, hosting issues, software issues, and client level issues. Set-up and teaching issues concern the initial configuration of the student learning environments, as well as the teaching responsibilities that fell outside of the scope of routine undergraduate business education program delivery. Software issues encompass the challenges of teaching the SAP R/3 system. Hosting issues refer to the realities of running a lab-based course in an application server provider (ASP) environment. The client level issues are specific to the Dolphin course design in which students work on particular companies but are required to have access to corporate level settings. The first two sets of issues probably exist in most software laboratory teaching environments, while the latter two are specific to the lab component of the course.

The set-up requirements of the lab component were much more onerous than expected. The instructor must develop the student environment on the corresponding server. The initial set-up requires the configuration of two separate environments, one for demonstration purposes and the other for student work. In total, this amounts to fifty to eighty hours of work, depending on the instructor's knowledge of the system. The outcome of this set-up task is the creation of two master clients that can be copied each time the course is subsequently taught. Thus, the set-up time for future course offerings is lessened, but only as long as the same server and SAP R/3 versions are used. If either of these parameters changes then the entire process must be repeated in the new environment.