Hi Campus Community,

If you have not heard, the College recently received some supplemental funding in the State’s FY17 budget to assist us in the complete overhaul of our Jenzabar CX (CARS/Portal) enterprise resource planning (ERP) / student information system (SIS). As we move from the 17 year old Jenzabar system to the next generation solution, we will revolutionize the way we all do our work, and greatly improve the student experience. We have begun the project by initially working within offices and departments to identify the core functionalities that will be required of any new system. The current discovery phase of the project is scheduled to complete this May and we expect to have a request for proposals (RFP) on the street in late Fall at the latest.

This is a mid-project update on the work to prepare the College for selection of an administrative database system to replace Jenzabar CX.

We are now finishing the organization of information gathered through meetings with those administrative units who use Jenzabar CX or have systems that interact with it. This body of information will assist us in our determination of needs and priorities for the system that will replace CX. It will also help us identify work process modifications to consider.

We have also largely completed an inventory of other information systems in use at the College. This will guide us in the analysis of: 1) functions that might be met by the new ERP (enabling replacement of existing systems); 2) systems that will remain and will need to interact with the new system; 3) a forecast of work and costs required in either case–retiring an existing system or connecting them to the new.

Everyone is encouraged to view the project documents that can be found in the ERP Community Folder within Google Drive. You will see that the information gathered in each administrative unit is available to be viewed by all project participants. These documents give us a unique view of administrative data processing across the whole College and a sense of what will affect selection of a replacement system.

Next steps:

• Reasoned list of vendors to whom the eventual RFP should be sent. Original target date: April 15th. Probable completion date: April 25th.
• Recommendation for implementation strategy. Target date: May 6th.
• Completion of final report: May 13th.
• Please contact Emily Carter with about any matters bearing on the work reported here.
• We have accomplished a lot of valuable work in the past six weeks and are on course to complete on schedule, in May.