INTRODUCTION

Over the years there has been an increased effort to include more coverage of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems in the business school curriculum (Antonucci, Corbitt, Stewart & Harris, 2004). This is in large part due to the increased demand from businesses for graduates with ERP experience. In order to meet this demand there is a noticeable trend away from the traditional "silo" style of teaching, where each functional area discusses topics related to their particular area and not how it impacts others. The traditional silo structure of business degrees and the highly integrative scope of ERP systems make this quite a challenge for many programs of study. This paper describes how one university implemented ERP/SAP into their introductory information systems course.

The market usually determines the specific courses to offer in a particular major. For information systems an additional resource is the consideration of the guidelines set by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the world's largest educational and scientific computing society and the Association for Information Systems (AIS), the premier global organization for academics specializing in information systems. Over the years, they have jointly developed guidelines for IS curriculum. Their guidelines have evolved over time with the most recent update occurring in 2010. One of the notable modifications to IS-2010 is the increase in emphasis towards enterprise systems (Topi, Valachich, Wright, Kaiser, Nonamaker, Sipior, & deVreede (2010).

IS-2010 suggests topics to cover in the core information systems courses along with topics to cover in elective information systems courses. The guidelines specify a stand-alone enterprise systems course as an elective, whereby, the student receives in-depth coverage of enterprise systems and how they integrate information across the different functional areas.

In order to give the student additional exposure to ERP systems, the guidelines also suggest including the enterprise systems as a component in the Foundations of Information Systems core course. In our particular college, ERP systems were already discussed in the introductory IS course. The IS faculty in the College of Business decided to follow the recommendation and increase the amount of time and assignments dedicated to ERP systems. With the support from the Dean and chairs in the college we decided to provide students handson experience to an ERP package.

While IS 2010 doesn't recommend a specific ERP software package, they do specify that, "It is, however, preferable that the course include exposure to and hands-on use of one of the two large Enterprise System vendors in the market place, SAP or Oracle, or one of the several smaller vendors such as SSA Global, Microsoft (Axapta, Great Plains and Solomon), Intuit, or Minicom, to name a few." (Topi, et al., 2010, p. 60).

There are many benefits to hands-on learning, such as, greater retention of the material and the increased development of critical thinking skills (Haury & Rillero, 1994). Many of the ERP packages offer educational pricing to universities making is affordable to acquiring access to the various software applications. To varying degrees, instructional support material is also offered (Barnes & Ferguson, 2008).

These ERP systems will give the student exposure to the concept of an enterprise system. The IS faculty decided that SAP would be most advantageous for the student. The ERP application most widely used in the workplace is SAP. As of 2011, SAP had the largest market share based on revenue at 25.5%. This is with a 13.2% growth from 2010 (Gartner, 2012).

SAP UNIVERSITY ALLIANCE (UA)

There are essentially two methods to offering a hands-on approach to using SAP, selfhosted or being hosted externally. A major drawback to self-hosting, is maintaining the hardware and currency of the software. Included in the hardware and software costs, the technical staff required in supporting a self-hosted SAP package can be costly. A potential departure of a key technical support person can drastically alter the effective delivery of exposure to SAP. To help in this regard, SAP has created the SAP University Alliances (UA) Program. UA's purpose is to support universities efforts in designing courses for students.

SAP University Alliances has created the University Competence Centers (UCCs) so that each university wanting to offer a hands-on approach to SAP does not have to invest in the hardware and technical expertise to run SAP (SCN, 2012). The UCCs will upgrade and support the latest version of SAP.

An additional advantage to being hosted by one of the UCC's is access to all of the existing University Alliance (UA) curriculum, which is a vast amount of documentation and hands-on exercises created by academicians for the specific use of other academicians in a classroom environment.

The UA also offers numerous workshops throughout the year at various locations around the world. These workshops are designed for faculty who are just starting out with SAP to more advanced topics that deal with business analytics, SAP/ERP configuration, to SAP Simulations.

External hosting sites have two locations in the United States - California State University, Chico and University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee and three overseas - Otto-vonGuerickeUniversitt in Magdeburg, Germany, Technische Universitt Mnchen in Munich, Germany, and Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia. There are currently over 1,200 member institutions.

UA is divided into four different regions: North America, Latin America, Asia/Pacific/Japan, Europe/Middle East/Africa. The table below is a breakdown of the number of institutions, number of instructors and the number of student participants in the last year. These numbers address the popularity of using SAP in the curriculum. While the North American region does not have the highest number of institutions or the highest number of instructors, it does have the largest number of student participants at over 100,000. Another point of interest is the large number of participating institutions from the Europe/Middle East/Africa region, at 783 they far outnumber North America's 237 institutions. Figure 1 below is a graphical depiction of the data in Table 1 with the size of the sphere indicating the number of student participants.

In order to further assist individuals getting familiar with SAP, SAP has created the SAP Community Network (SCN). SCN is a social network site built for professionals to assist them with questions they may have regarding enterprise software. SCN is made up of discussion forums, active blogs, videos, and millions of users to assist with technical issues that users may come across.

IMPLEMENTATION ISSUES

Once the decision was made of incorporating SAP into the curriculum, the next step was to provide proper training for the faculty with an interest in SAP. This was done by providing adequate resources for faculty to attend numerous SAP UA workshops that are offered throughout the year. For SAP UA members there are no registration fees, travel and lodging are the primary expenses incurred for attending the workshops. The faculty members from our college who volunteered to attend the workshops in SAP were primarily from the Information Systems, Accounting, Operations Management, and Human Resource Management areas.

The workshops are typically taught by faculty for faculty, "train-the-trainer" is the term often used for the workshops. The first workshop required before attending any of the other advanced workshops is typically the "Introduction to SAP ERP using Global Bike, Inc." Global Bike, Inc. is a fictitious company that is one of many that is used by SAP UA in providing case material for instructional purposes. Other fictitious companies created are IDES, Fitter Snacker, Fly-A-Kite, and ALMIKA. The course materials offered in these workshops are vast and available for UA members for use in their courses.

For the Introductory Information Systems course, at this particular college of business, Global Bike, Inc. cases were utilized. The topic of ERP systems follows the database discussion and helps to reinforce the database concepts. One of the primary goals in this course is to familiarize the students with the SAP GUI and to get them accustomed to navigating through the SAP menu. Another primary goal is to emphasize the importance of ERP as a cross functional system. This is accomplished by having the students work through the process of "Materials Management," whereby in SAP, they perform the following tasks:

* create a new vendor

* create a new trading material

* request quotes from various vendors

* accept a quote

* create a purchase order based on the quote

* post the goods receipt

* verify physical receipt in stock

* post payment to the vendor

* review the G/L accounts

To further reinforce the concepts, a second case dealing with "Sales and Distribution" is done. For the Introductory IS course, these cases were slightly modified from the original by taking out the numerous screen shots and providing more of a scavenger hunt through the SAP menu system.

The College of Business also decided that in order to provide an incentive for students to take the courses with SAP exposure, the College would offer a Certificate of Completion to students who have successfully completed at least three courses with SAP content.

One of the discussions that arose during this process was what role do management information system's majors play in the use of established ERP systems. Businesses still have the functional areas that make specific use of various components of the ERP system. Information Systems' majors would take on the role of a "Super User." Super Users possess the following skills (Dollries, 2009):

* "First line of support for users

* Representative for the department / process team

* Ability to communicate effectively with technical team, users and management

* Testing expertise

* Outstanding SAP training

* Continuous process improvement

* Ability to document processes, functional specification etc.

* SAP knowledge"

Another issue that comes up is how to incorporate the ERP software into multiple courses. The more exposure students have to a particular topic will lead to an increased understanding of the material. A difficulty arises in coordinating across disciplines (LeRouge & Webb, 2004). The complex nature of ERP systems demands more exposure than simply a single course offering. Informal interviews were conducted with students who have completed the single Introductory course and those that have had additional course work from other areas, it is apparent that the amount of benefit a student receives is vastly increased with the additional exposure the student receives from the other classes. Typically students who only had the single course had comments similar to "It's a waste of time." While students completing multiple courses and who had become familiar with the software interface had comments similar to, "I see how it all ties together and see how beneficial this is."

CONCLUSIONS

This paper describes why SAP was selected and how SAP is implemented into the introductory Information Systems course. With the increased emphasis being placed on enterprise resource planning systems it is important for educational institutions to give students proper exposure to these systems. A hands-on approach that enables the students to gain valuable experience using an ERP system is very beneficial. SAP offers many resources to help instructors in incorporating SAP into the curriculum. In order for students to get the full benefits from their experience with SAP, they need to understand cross functional business processes and this needs to be done with ERP/SAP exposure in multiple courses.

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