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Enterprise Systems Software in Business School

Curriculum – Evaluation of Design and Delivery

ABSTRACT

Considering the increasing importance of enterprise systems in business, and their pedagogical value in demonstrating business process orientation and concepts of integration, several universities have incorporated popular enterprise system (ES) software products such as SAP R/3 into their business school curricula. This paper describes an attempt at that integration and reports on the evaluation of the curriculum design and instructional strategies employed and the perceived knowledge gain. Based on the self-assessment of students’ knowledge and students’ perception of various aspects of the curriculum design and delivery, the effectiveness of the course was analysed. Analysis revealed that the students had perceived a significantly higher level of knowledge gain during the course on the knowledge domains such as implementation of enterprise systems and SAP software skills than on others such as interface knowledge and management knowledge. Expansion of the curriculum to enhance the depth of the SAP skills, more guest lectures to bring real-world experiences into the class room, integrated project that requires application of conceptual as well as technical (software) skills of students, more case studies that deal with postimplementation issues, better alignment of this course curriculum with other pre-requisite courses, and improvement in the knowledge of academic staff and their access to students are some of the potential improvements emerging from this study. The study also noted significant differences between Commerce and Information Technology (IT) students with IT students more satisfied with the course than the Commerce students.

Keywords: Enterprise Systems, Business Curriculum, Design, Evaluation, SAP

1. INTRODUCTION

Universities are generally criticised for lagging behind businesses in the adoption of new technologies in general and information technologies in particular. The integration of information technologies into the business school curricula in the past concentrated on imparting IT skills to students and/or using it as a technology based aid for improving the teaching and learning effectiveness and efficiencies. Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, also known as enterprise systems (ES) are one of the major technologies in recent times that had a significant impact on business organisations. Though the ability of enterprise systems (ES) in teaching concepts of cross-functional integration, are well recognised and discussed in the academic literature, many business schools/faculties are slow in incorporating these latest software products in their curricula. Enterprise systems, by their multi-dimensional, integrative and normative nature, offer the depth of functionality and breadth of integration required for managing global operations of business organisations today. These systems create new, hitherto unknown opportunities for demonstrating powerful concepts of business process integration (Fedorowicz et al, 2004) and may contribute to imparting innovative integrative skills to business graduates (Cecez-Kecmanovic et al, 2002). They are expected to enable a change in the delivery of business education from a functional orientation to a business process orientation and lead to the integration of curriculum across functions (Becerra-Fernandez et al, 2000; Johnson et al, 2004). In fact, long after their ‘state-of-the-art’ status, enterprise systems software solutions are expected to provide a sound pedagogical basis for teaching the concept of ‘integration’ and ‘business process orientation’ to business graduates (Joseph & George, 2002).

Incorporating SAP R/3 or any such ES software into business school curricula is considered difficult and challenging (Noguera & Watson, 2001; Seethamraju, 2004a). Though several universities have incorporated ES software into their business curricula, the extent and nature of such integration is different from one university to another. While some have incorporated ES software into one subject, others have designed a full-fledged program around enterprise systems. This paper reports on one such attempt by a large business school in Australia and analyses the effectiveness of curriculum design, delivery, administration and pedagogical issues.

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