RMIT, Australia's biggest university, has committed its student academic and business records to a new student administration system to be developed in partnership with PeopleSoft.
The deal makes RMIT-- and its 50,000 students -- PeopleSoft's biggest Student Administration System customer in Australia. The new system is expected to be implemented by the middle of next year. RMIT has appointed Melbourne-based consulting company Advanced Strategic Technologies to configure and implement the system.
Project director, Associate Professor Paul Kennedy, who is director of Learning Technology Services at RMIT, described it as a "big undertaking for the university... 10 times bigger than a financial ERP for a AU$350 million business."
Kennedy said that replacing the old student records system with a Web-oriented one that includes a business management system will provide a better standard of service to students at a lower cost. It follows on from a decision the university made two years ago to make a big investment in IT, although its focus has been on academic services and e-learning facilities, rather than administration.
"We want to minimise the cost of managing the relationship with the students and provide better value," Kennedy added.
The university's operating environment is based on Compaq NT servers, Oracle database and other vendors' applications, which made the selection of PeopleSoft more noteworthy.
Rob Wells, the director of operations for PeopleSoft Australia and New Zealand, said it was "thrilled to be working with RMIT on the implementation of Student Administration and believe RMIT is a significant customer".
Of RMIT's partnership with the software vendor, Kennedy acknowledged that a lot of work was required before the project would deliver any results. He claimed that one of the ways PeopleSoft benefits from its work with Australian universities has been in product development. Kennedy said the Australian tertiary education sector was more advanced in its business thinking than its US counterparts.
"Ideas [for the use of the software] generated by Australian customers have a significant influence on the way the [PeopleSoft] product is developed, especially in Web use," he claimed.
RMIT University is understood to be PeopleSoft's 10th Australian university customer.
