The University of Auckland’s anticipated 10-year journey to composability had to start with the right first step: leveraging familiarity and trust.
New Zealand’s largest higher-learning institute, University of Auckland (UoA), had been encountering challenges in managing competing applications with a very limited number of IT staff, amid a shortage of skilled engineers familiar with their current enterprise resource planning (ERP) investments.
Based on a cost and resource needs analysis, UoA’s management decided against upgrading its Oracle applications because the ROI was insufficient. Instead, they elected to migrate to a next-generation, composable ERP platform.
This strategic decision has allowed the university to dedicate its IT team’s focus towards its upcoming ERP migration, a transformational project expected to take 10 years for completion across multiple phases — and greatly enhance the end user experience and capabilities for its growing number of students and staff.
According to Jo Batchelor, UoA’s Head of Product Engineering: “(We) performed an internal audit of (our) ERP platforms, learning the scope and amount of data in (our) HR and finance systems that we would need to protect. There is a huge amount of data in our HR, finance and campus solutions that we need to make sure is absolutely safe and secure.”
When selecting a managed service provider to take on the day-to-day operation of its HR system, UoA evaluated various competing solutions and decided on an existing ERP support vendor, Rimini Street, Inc., that already has a good track record and possesses an intimate knowledge of the university’s technology landscape and requirement to reallocate IT team resources to the ERP migration project.
Batchelor noted that the value of choosing Rimini was not “just about enabling the move to a new system, but to build out a roadmap that is proactive and designed to last.”
Said their vendor’s Global Vice President and General Manager (ANZ and Oceania), Daniel Benad: “Rimini Street is proud to continue partnering with and delivering excellence for the University of Auckland, allowing them to positively impact the community by offering more robust learning programs that greatly benefit the next generation of professionals and members of society at affordable costs.”
