(Posted 10-30-00)
IMMEDIATE RELEASE
News Service Contact: Steve Gilliam, 336-334-5371
SAP CORP. GIVES BRYAN SCHOOL
$2 MILLION SOFTWARE SYSTEM
Dr. John Neufeld |
GREENSBORO—SAP Corporation, the international software giant, is helping the Bryan School of Business and Economics introduce enterprise resource planning (ERP) into its business curriculum.
The company has given the Bryan School its complete training base software program, along with technical support for its installation and training for faculty members who will be phasing it into their classes this fall and next spring. All totaled, the package and support is valued at more than $2 million. Bryan School officials, however, say the new software will provide a much greater added value to the business education that students will receive in the future.
“With this gift, SAP Corporation has opened the way for the Bryan School to help our students acquire a unique set of skills that are very much in demand in the business world,” said Dr. James Weeks, dean of the Bryan School. “In addition to helping add cutting-edge technology to its curriculum, the gift from SAP also involves the school in a strategic partnership with one of the world’s leading software companies.”
In business and industry, Weeks explained, ERP is a highly integrated software system that allows a business to manage and coordinate a broad range of activities across different divisions and on national and multinational levels. It can take into account such international manufacturing aspects as measurement, currency and time differences. ERP is being used widely in large businesses, which need to more tightly coordinate their processes.
The Bryan School is the largest of the six professional schools at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. It has approximately 2,100 undergraduates and 300 graduate students who are taught by 80 faculty members. The new SAP/ERP software will be used to teach courses in all four of the school’s four academic departments: accounting, business administration, economics, and information systems and operations management. The school offers studies leading to the B.S. and B.A. degrees, and the M.B.A., M.S. and M.A. degrees.
Area corporations currently using the SAP version of ERP include VF Corporations, R.F. Micro Devices and Lucent Technologies. The Bryan School is a member of the SAP University Alliance program. The school is the only alliance member in the Triad and one of very few in the state. Through the alliance, SAP America Inc. works with universities to help them use the software as a tool for teaching.
The SAP training base program was installed in early September and faculty members are receiving training on merging it with their classes. A core group of 12 faculty members has been involved with the project for over a year, and all have received training from SAP during the past six months. Dr. John Neufeld, an economics professor, is coordinating the efforts to implement the programming into the curriculum.
In the Bryan School, students will be using the huge SAP database, which Neufeld says amounts to one of the largest business cases ever assembled. The fictitious company is an international motorcycle manufacturer with plants in several countries. The database, however, contains enormous amounts of data not only on business dealings, contracts and conditions, but also human resource information on employees. When the material is integrated into different subjects, students will receive a more thorough understanding of how different divisions of a business are interdependent.
“An ERP program can do a lot of things, but the biggest thing it can do is run an entire company,” said Neufeld. “It flows from the people who take orders, to accounting, to the factory floor to the shipping department. It can integrate different divisions of a corporation.
“When the training base program is fully integrated in the Bryan School, we’ll have a supplement to our business education that will provide students with a hands-on experience in using state-of-the-art software. It won’t change what we teach in accounting, human resources or operations management, but it will help students understand the interrelatedness of a business.”
The SAP software gift complements two gifts totaling $45,000, with one from RF Micro Devices Inc. of Greensboro and the other from William A. “Dean” Priddy Jr., the technology manufacturing firm’s chief financial officer and vice president for administration. In making his gift, Priddy said that an enterprise software curriculum would put UNCG at the leading edge in preparing future business leaders.
SAP Corporation is one of the world’s largest suppliers of business software, Neufeld said. A June conference/convention in Las Vegas drew an estimated 13,000 business people who came for company-sponsored workshops. The company has several training centers around the country, to which the Bryan School has been sending its implementation committee for training.
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