Enterprise Resource Planning

Boise State University Moves ERP to the Cloud

• By Rhea Kelly
• 03/26/15

In an effort to transform core business processes and advance strategic goals, Boise State University is moving its ERP to the Oracle Enterprise Resource Planning Cloud. The institution is working with Oracle Consulting on the implementation, with four primary goals:

• Automate and transform business processes across the entire ERP lifecycle including financial management and billing, procurement, grant management, project management and reporting to drive greater operational efficiency and organizational effectiveness;
• Empower staff with information and critical insight when and where they need it;
• Reduce IT complexity and boost IT agility to meet rapidly changing needs; and
• Improve total cost of IT ownership while ensuring scalability.

By choosing a cloud-based solution, Boise State will also sidestep the costs of purchasing, building out and modernizing hardware infrastructure, as well as the costs associated with typical on-premise upgrades, according to a press release.

For the first phase, the system will be rolled out to finance team members, university administrators and academic staff members. The university also hopes to apply more precision and transparency to its grants management efforts, an important process for expanding research and graduate programs.

"We are eager to experience the many benefits that Oracle ERP Cloud can deliver to our growing university, including greater agility to adapt to the rapidly changing dynamics in higher education and at our own institution," said Jo Ellen Dinucci, associate vice president of finance and administration at Boise State, in a prepared statement. "As we begin our move to Oracle Cloud, we are excited by the prospect that the savings from process improvements will more than offset the costs of the solution — all while delivering reliability and scalability and allowing us to benefit rapidly from the latest features and functionality."

Max Davis-Johnson, the institution's associate vice president and CIO, commented, "The benefits of moving to a cloud-based system are all there: reducing infrastructure costs; the opportunity to repurpose staff to other needed areas; eliminating costly upgrades; keeping the system current; the ability to grow and scale as needed."