Can you think of circumstances where a company might want to install an enterprise management system, such as SAP R/3, even though it appears that this would be significantly more expensive than developing a comparable system in-house? Discuss.

On a Monday morning in August 1998, Jim Buckler, project manager of the University of Nebraska’s Administrative System Project (ASP), was preparing for his weekly meeting with the project’s steering committee, the Financial System Task Force (FSTF). The ASP is an effort charged with implementing SAP’s R/3 client/server enterprise resource planning (ERP) product for the University of Nebraska’s multicampus system.
As a result of mapping the University’s future business processes to the SAP R/3 system, a number of gaps were identified between these processes and those offered by the SAP R/3 system. These critical gaps were tracked as one of the project’s critical success factors. Project management and the FSTF had to consider all factors that could potentially be impacted by the critical gaps. Such factors include the scope of the project, resources (human and budgetary), the timeline, and previous configuration of the system, to name a few.