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expanding Campus. The OCMS was a student management system developed in- house that facilitated student admission, registration and assessment of online students. However, there was no capacity to accommodate the more than 15,000 face-to-face students and the increasing number of online students and programmes. Following this assessment, the Campus embarked on a process to identify the most reliable and cost effective enterprise planning resource for the management of its student and administrative platforms. The Campus leadership, acknowledging the limitations of the in-house original system, approached the Canadian Government for financial assistance to, amongst other things, identify, source and implement a new ERP solution. The funding was granted under the SDEC project. The Campus recruited external consultants to conduct needs assessment of its various entities to determine the most suitable system for the Campus.
Based on the requirements gathering and needs assessment by the consultants, the Banner Student Management System by Ellucian was selected as the most appropriate ERP system for the Campus. The Campus moved ahead with implementation plans which included creating the project charter (Appendix 7.9), deciding on the governance model and identifying the working groups for the project, identifying the specialised human resources required, and the human resource roles and responsibilities. (See Appendix 7.10)
The Campus hired an Implementation Director to mobilise the project resources (human and financial) and to ensure successful implementation of the project. On the functional side of the project, the project was supported by three functional analysts, two business analysts, several subject matter experts, and relevant departments across the Open Campus (Admissions, Registry including AAR, APAD, the OCCS and Finance). On the technical side of the project, CATS was reorganised to ensure that it was adequately structured to support the implementation requirements of the Banner student management system, manage the legacy system (OCMS) which was still being used by the Campus, as well as support student and staff needs during the project and transition. Additionally, the technical team