It gives me great pleasure to announce that NJIT has recently begun a multi-year, campus-wide effort to implement a new ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system to replace our current systems, which are nearing obsolescence.  The university has decided that SunGard Higher Education’s Banner ERP suite offers the “best-fit” for the university's current and future ERP needs.  Banner will support most of the university’s major business functions, e.g. admissions, financial aid, student records, student accounts, human resources, payroll, budget, finance and grants management. In keeping with the university’s strategic plan, a major emphasis, while implementing the new systems, will be to reengineer administrative and academic processes to improve customer and student satisfaction. Hence the efforts to implement new ERP systems at NJIT have been branded as 'Project ORBIT' (Organizational Reengineering using Banner Information Technology).

Project ORBIT will be the largest system change in the history of NJIT and will affect faculty, staff and students.  A Project Management Steering Committee has been established to manage the projects’ successful implementation. Ed Bishof, Associate Vice President, University Budgeting will serve as the chair of this committee along with assistant chairs Kathy Kelly, Associate Vice President, Enrollment Planning and Dave Ullman, Associate Provost for Information Services and Technology and CIO. This committee will report regularly to an Executive Steering Committee of senior staff members.  Dana Knox, Associate Provost for Undergraduate Programs, will chair an advisory committee with broad representation from university constituencies to provide input for decisions on business process and practices and other key issues.  

The Project Management Steering Committee will coordinate the work of a number of teams implementing various modules of the new Banner software. Collegiate Project Services, a higher education project management firm, has been engaged to provide significant assistance in project management.

The teams supporting Project ORBIT have already begun meeting to develop implementation strategies. For many support offices, the training and implementation phases will begin in early September.  During this project, these offices will be handling significant extra work-loads that are required for a successful implementation.   

I encourage the entire university community to support and appreciate the enormous staff efforts that will be required for the success of Project ORBIT. Please feel free to direct any questions you may have to members of the Project Management Steering Committee.

Thanks,

Bob

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