Client Success story: Purdue University transforms the future with S/4HANA

Purdue decided to move to S/4. It really wasn't a technology decision. It came back to Purdue's mission around affordability and making higher education more affordable. My name is Vicky Farnsworth, and I'm the executive director of Enterprise Solutions at Purdue. After a couple of years of frozen tuition, it was really hard to understand our financial position and how long we could continue to freeze tuition. So the CFO decided that with a lot of the different disparate systems and the reporting problems we were having that it made sense to really rethink our business processes and then that led us down the path of looking. We were already working with EPI-USE services on our transformation and helping us modify our business processes, and so we just started a conversation with Labs and the services that they offer and it grew from there and it really was part of that true partnership. They brought lots of benefits to the table. Commercialization partnership, we've built software together, marketing together. So, it's really been much part of a larger relationship. I think running S/4 on HANA, we were getting some added benefits of less reconciliation across the different ledgers. We're also seeing some faster performance. And then from a user experience, as we eliminated paper, we've developed software with EPI-USE Labs around the fringes and by picking the right tools, I think we've really made the user experience much better for faculty and students. We have owned EPI-USE Labs tools for a very long time, Query Manager, Data Sync Manager, but I think it wasn't until this project that we really started using them for their intended purpose. And I think moving forward, you know, we will take advantage of those as we think about reporting and how we move users around and the data security and compliance things it provides. So that probably is a learning lesson there is that we had tools we were paying for and we weren't using them. I would definitely use EPI-USE Labs again. And Philip was on campus not very long ago and I'm trying to solve a problem. We commercialize some of our teaching and learning software that we develop and we don't support it well after we sell it to another university and so EPI-USE is coming up with a plan for how they may take over support of those teaching and learning tools. So because of those unique things that pop up, it's completely outside of the ERP space but because we have that kind of open relationship, you know, we reach out to them in many different ways. So definitely would use them again and not limit the things we work on together.

Transforming Purdue University

The challenge: Transform Purdue

Founded in 1869, with over 3,000 academic staff, Purdue University is a public research university in West Lafayette, Indiana made up of 13 schools and colleges. Purdue partnered with EPI-USE Labs to support their Transform Purdue Business Process Re-engineering project and realize its strategic objectives through a redesign of accounting structures to reconcile financials and perform accurate projections, improve user experience, enhance transparency and reporting, automate key business processes to remove redundancies and eliminate paper from all processes. Along with the redefined financial structure, Purdue upgraded to SAP S/4HANA 1610.

Why Transform?

Purdue needed to move to S/4HANA to take advantage of future innovations for the University. Purdue’s financial structure was too complex, impacting their ability to quickly create financial reporting at various leadership levels. Lack of standardization around financial elements, terms, best practices and procedures affected their data integrity. Due to their complexity, the ability to easily move units with their financial parameters intact was a difficult, timely process. It was time to rebuild and redefine their core financial structure to use SAP functionality and organize data to help alleviate reporting issues they were facing.

Key challenges on the road to S/4HANA

Desire to outsource (hosting and management of landscape)
Finding a flexible partner with consistency over the long term
Lack of in-house HANA skills
Basis team was costly, with key members nearing retirement
Hardware (including for DR) would need to be procured
Benefits unknown for greenfield vs brownfield

Why EPI-USE Labs?

As Purdue was looking for a partner to host their S/4H System, they didn’t want to allocate resources to an administrative system where they would have to learn new technologies. EPI-USE Labs offered:

Rapid prototyping of S/4HANA on AWS, allowing Purdue to validate the approach
A long-term investment with Purdue
A flexible, tailored approach to service delivery

The Transform Purdue project was an ambitious undertaking that required the right software and implementation partners for us to be successful. Moving to SAP S/4HANA allowed us to modernize our business processes, resulting in year-over-year cost savings while leveraging our SAP investment. Couple this with EPI-USE’s extensive reputation for transforming how higher education does business, and we had a winning combination. We look forward to our continued partnerships and supporting the university’s core mission to be a leading educator and expand knowledge sharing globally.

Victoria Farnsworth, Executive Director, IT Enterprise, Purdue University

The solution: System Conversion to S/4HANA 1610

As part of the Transform Purdue initiative, Purdue entrusted the migration, hosting and management of all its SAP systems to global software solutions and managed services company EPI-USE Labs. This includes S/4HANA, BW, GRC, PI/XI, HCM/Payroll and employee self-services for more than 30,000 employees across four campuses.

Innovative SAP migration and upgrade

To enable Purdue properly to vet their transformation business case and migration strategy, EPI-USE Labs performed a rapid two-week cloud-based migration and conversion to S/4HANA using AWS. Due to the large SAP footprint, the amount of customization and a desire to keep existing history, Purdue chose to go with the System Conversion Approach from an existing ECC 6.0 SAP system to S/4HANA 1610.

S/4HANA conversion rapid prototyping on AWS
Eight complete ECC6 to S/4HANA conversions
Re-platforming to HANA on Suse Linux
Trialed and committed to new “DMO with system move” option

Fully managed SAP hosting offering

The managed systems are hosted in two of the EPI-USE Labs data centers located in the US, to provide full redundancy. EPI-USE Labs' Managed Services team uses its automated software to monitor, automate and orchestrate this complex landscape, Data Sync Manager to maintain refreshed non-productive systems and mask sensitive data, and Client Central as an incident and change management tracking facility.

S/4HANA, BW, PI, GRC, Biller Direct, SAP Mobile Platform, SAP IDM
Full data center migration of SAP assets
24x7 support via global support team
SAP HANA TDI certified Fujitsu hardware
Full multi-site DR solution with redundant data centers (Atlanta, Dallas)
Full networking and security implementation

About Purdue University

Purdue University is a public research university in West Lafayette, Indiana and is the flagship campus of the Purdue University system, founded in 1869 when Lafayette businessman John Purdue donated land and money to establish a college of science, technology, and agriculture in his name. The main campus in West Lafayette offers more than 200 majors for undergraduates, over 69 masters and doctoral programs, and professional degrees in pharmacy and veterinary medicine. Purdue also has 18 intercollegiate sports teams and more than 900 student organizations. Purdue is a member of the Big Ten Conference. The University has the fourth largest international student population among US universities and in 2018 improved its Time Higher Education global ranking to 60th.

Year founded: 1869
Academic staff: 19,441
Total Enrollment: 58,006
Made up of 13 schools and colleges