Enterprise Integration in Business Education: Design and Outcomes of a Capstone ERP-based Undergraduate e-Business Management Course

This article describes the design, delivery, and outcomes of a course on enterprise integration at the senior undergraduate level in the e-business concentration in the University of New Brunswick's Faculty of Business. The course aims to provide education to the young business manager regarding the process of adoption and exploitation of an ERP or enterprise-wide software system. The course is deliberately "business-centric" rather than technology-oriented. It contains two streams: a management component based on readings and discussion, and a hands-on laboratory component in which students individually configure a firm. We evaluated students' performance in three areas: completion of a learning log containing literature summaries and reflections on individual learning, completion of configuration exercises on SAP R/3, and completion of a take-home business case. We offer several suggestions to potential providers of enterprise integration education to business students. First, do not underestimate the considerable operational requirements of a lab-based ERP course. Second, because no business-oriented curriculum for enterprise integration business education is presently available on the market, teachers must be prepared to develop one. Third, students have very different learning needs with respect to ERP. The combination of hands-on lab learning and management learning via reading, discussions, and cases is very powerful but it is a challenge to balance the two streams and to relate the lab learnings with the management learnings.