Scottish universities launch £42m ERP tender Universities across Scotland are clubbing together to soften up the market in preparation for an enterprise software procurement estimated to be worth £42m. The historic Cloisters of Glasgow University The historic cloisters of Glasgow University Advanced Procurement for Universities and Colleges (APUC), the buying company …
This is interesting. Given the atrocious history of ERP projects I have been reading recently, I am really curious : what makes them think that grouping universities is going to make it work better ?
Or maybe it will, since there will be less manglement of the project and it will be managed by a group that wants the whole thing to actually work instead of being managed by one guy who just wants a star on his CV, or a group of psychotics who view this as an empire building exercise (by excluding all other empires, of course).
So, I'm curious.
Like large companies with multi country divisions or operations they'll probably host it all on a central tower with each University having access to its own separate client and data.
The key to this is getting stakeholder and technical agreement on who owns what in terms of that central tower - and who makes the decisions when common or integration change is required.
From what I understand of these Framework agreements they are intended as a sort of "pre qualification" for suppliers to ensure that their relevant offerings meet various agreed standards. This saves each buyer and supplier reduplicating effort on the common due diligence stuff. Then the actual tender from any particular University can concentrate on the specific detail. Suppliers inside the Framework are preferred, those outside the Framework need some specific advantage to justify access. What actually happens is a question well above my pay grade!
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