In 1985 UNCW began implementing Information Associates’ Series Z, a higher education administrative suite of systems designed to run on an OpenVMS VAX cluster platform.  The initial implementation included Financial Records System (FRS) and Student Information System (SIS).  This was followed by Human Resources System (HRS) in 1989 and the Alumni Development System (ADS) in 1993.  Over the next several years, a number of add-on modules were implemented to compliment the major four systems - Purchasing, On-Course (degree auditing), Fixed Assets, Housing and Classroom Management as well as Web for Students and Faculty – UNCW’s Seaweb.  By 1998, all systems had been upgraded to the SCT Plus2000 suite and Y2K compliant.   In 2001, the university implemented SCT Campus Pipeline, a Web portal platform which fosters community building, and efficiencies as well as integrates with disparate systems and applications into a unified whole.   

In 2002, after sixteen years on virtually the same platform, the university began to consider migrating to a new platform with expanded capabilities.  During this sixteen year period the university’s student population nearly doubled, growing from a headcount of 5777 in 1985 to 10,729 in 2002.  Although the Plus systems had served the university well during these growth years, there were signs that the university administrative systems needed to change in order to respond to the growing numbers students, faculty and staff, and the expanded capabilities and expectations this growth brings.   Some of these new capabilities and expectations include:

Accessibility 24 X 7 and to information from anywhere GUI and Web interface Scalability – limitations for expandability of current systems Totally integrate systems Additional functionality provided by new technologies Enhanced drill-down capabilities and extracts

Accessibility 24 X 7 access to information anywhere

In today’s world, students and prospective students have come to expect to be able to access services from anywhere at any time.  Prospective students may be from anywhere in the world; their expectation is to be able to submit an application to UNCW at their convenience.  This often time does not fit with the current schedule for taking the Student Information self-service (Seaweb) offline for six to seven hours each night.  Similarly, many currently enrolled students find the best time to use Seaweb services such as registering for classes, paying tuition and fees, and accessing their records is in the early hours of the morning when the system is not available.  As with students, the faculty also find they need access at all hours and from anywhere.    As the university populations finds their work taking them to meetings, conferences and training anywhere as close as the Wilmington Hilton to a far away as Johannesburg, South Africa, university employees at all levels find they need and expect to be able to access the administrative systems conveniently, that means anywhere at anytime.

GUI and Web interface expectations

With the exception of the Seaweb web-services components for Students and Faculty, the Plus2000 suite is old technology using the same text /terminal based screens as in the 1980s.  This often poses a problem with younger employees who are more accustomed to the Web and client server based applications.  GUI and Web interfaces provide a similar look and feel to desk-top applications.  New employees find it much quicker to grasp application concepts when they are more comfortable with the user interfaces.  This results in an overall decrease in the learning curve for using applications. 

Scalability – limitations for expandability of current systems

With the grown in enrollment has also come the need for increased services.  The current SCT Plus200 has been expanded to accommodate many of these services.  Unfortunately, some of the services are not well supported by the Plus2000 technologies.  In come situations, the Plus2000 system has reached system limitations which imposed constraints on university processing.  For example, the Student Accounts module in SIS has “maxed-out” its tuition and fee tables just when the University is looking at expanding its tuition/fee structure.   File constraints prevent users from collecting and maintaining additional information that could provide useful and needed functionality. Auxiliary data is often kept on other databases.  Often, as with financial aid regulatory enhancements, required functionality is “band-aided” onto the system providing less that adequate functionality because of file structure limitation.  For these reasons, the university SACS committee recommended a new Student Information System with greater functionality be implemented based on Financial Aid’s needs alone.

Need for totally integrated systems

Our current Plus2000 systems are designed around the “silo” based concept where each system, although somewhat integrated, are not totally integrated.  For example, base bio/demographic data such as name, phone number, and addresses may be stored and maintained on SIS, HRS, and ADS for the same person.  The question is often, “Who has the correct name and address?”  This results not only redundant data and the confusion of who has the correct data but also duplication data entry.  Coding schemes for the same data may be different in different system.  This causes confusion for persons using multiple systems and difficulty in merging data from the different systems.  Security synchronization is an on going problem between systems.  Because ID changes are not always replicated across systems, system feeds often have problems.  Services for individual students, faculty or staff are sometimes interrupted because of synchronization problems between systems. 

Additional functionality provided by new technologies

The new technologies available today provide functionality and capabilities that the old technologies can not provide.  Many of these are functionalities that have become ubiquitous in today’s applications and systems.  They include:

These are just a few expanded capabilities the end-user seeks in as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system today, capabilities that streamline processes and have added value, things that ten years ago were new to the industry but today are the standard.

At the same time UNCW was considering replacing their SCT Plus2000 suite with a new ERP system, other UNC Plus campuses were considering the same.  One option for a replacement was the SCT Banner® administrative solution.  Banner® provided the major technical and functional requirements for a new ERP plus it included migration tools specifically designed to migrate the Plus2000 data to Banner.  In February 2004, the UNC Shared Services Alliance (SSA) adopts a “statement of strategic intent” for the UNC Alliance campuses to migrate to the SCT Banner® administrative suite.   This included Finance, HR, Advancement, Student, Financial Aid,  Self Service for each, plus Workflow.   The final decision for each school to migrate to Banner® was based upon added capabilities and functionalities as well as synergies to be gained across campuses through the collaborative efforts among campuses in leveraging resources - financial, technical and human.   In Spring 2002, UNCW’s cabinet adopted the strategy to migration the SCT Plus2000 systems to SCT Banner® and identified Advancement and Finance to be the first systems to go-live.  July, 2004 was targeted as the go-live date for both Advancement and Finance.