Ravi Blogs about IT Topics

The past few months have been pretty difficult… Obama or Clinton? Patriots or Giants? and then Banner or PeopleSoft? As many of you know, we received the end of life notice on FRS, our current financial system software sometime last year and began discussions about the new financial system last Fall. After a lot of discussion, we shortlisted Banner, PeopleSoft and Kuali. It finally came down to Banner or PeopleSoft. And the decision was not easy! After all, we were choosing one of the most critical enterprise software… I can assure you that we took all aspects into consideration and the decision to go with PeopleSoft is the right one. Now, it is time to plan the implementation!

There are basically two broad philosophies that those in our shoes operate by – best of breed or a fully integrated system. There are advantages and disadvantages to both and since most of these are obvious ones, there is no point repeating them. You can read about the usual criteria discussed here.

Frankly, given our size and expertise, some might wonder why even bother looking anything other than PeopleSoft? We have been a PeopleSoft customer for a long time and have developed expertise in supporting it fabulously. So, the natural question was “Do we have the resources to support yet another system?”.

However, in the true tradition of ITS, we did not want to try to find the answers just by ourselves and driven purely based on technical reasoning. We wanted Finance and Administration to be an equal partner in making these decisions, because, after all, they have to live with whatever the choice happens to be.

So, we decided to look at options. SunGard currently supports FRS and offered a very attractive transition plan to Banner Financials; so it was natural for us to include them in further discussions. PeopleSoft was the other obvious choice, because we are a PeopleSoft shop! We really wanted to look at Kuali because of all the attention it has been getting recently and our own commitment to look at open source when a viable option exists in that space.

Kuali research revealed that it is too risky a proposition on many counts. The most important ones are:

• no one in our space (liberal arts colleges) or our size seemed to have signed on.
• the development platform is not something that we are strong at.

So, we decided to look only at Banner and PeopleSoft. This was an exhaustive and long process. Ed Below coordinated the process by arranging the vendor visits, preparing specific scenarios that the vendors were asked to address and then finally collecting the feedback from everyone who participated. Collectively, we spent a lot of time looking at various presentations, drilling them with difficult questions, and assessing the products as objectively as we all could.

Functionally, both Banner and PeopleSoft have strengths and weaknesses! User interface was better in one case, the chart of accounts was more versatile in the other. The way grants accounting was done in one was better than the other. One promised the world about project accounting (very much of interest to physical plant) and the other did the same about the ease of distributed reporting.

We took all of these into account, spoke to other schools about their experiences and consultants about the implementation cost.  We did some hard negotiating, thorough reading of contracts (which exposed a weird clause which tied the maintenance cost of the software to the annual budget increase of the university – since these budgets only go up, the maintenance would also only go up!) and revisions and finally made the decision. I should tell you that the race was VERY close…

But as I said earlier, I am very happy with the decision and the scrutiny (or agony, if you the vendor) that we put both the systems through…  Now, we need to put all our collective energies to make this a successful implementation.