THINK IT . UITS NEWSLETTER
| NOVEMBER 2011 |
3
During the summer of 2011, UITS
completed the upgrade of Banner
ERP system from version 7 to ver-
sion 8. The upgrade which had
been planned since December
2010 provided additional features
to the system which can poten-
tially be utilized by our university
community. In addition, the up-
grade ensured continuous vendor
support and alignment to our ser-
vice agreement with the product
vendor.
The latest banner version ex-
pands on the previous version by
providing better support for in-
ternational characters and ex-
panded name, address, telephone
number, and identifier fields. The
new release also includes a new
supplemental data engine which
can be utilized to provide better
system enhancements and cus-
tomization with less development
effort. The new version can also
provide the ability to provide
more “Rich text�? content for e-
services in the near future.
The Banner upgrade included up-
grades of the 3 main modules:
Student, Finance, and Human Re-
sources. Some examples of the
enhancements include:
Student: Catalog Extract &
load, Course Wait List, and
incomplete grades processing.
Finance: Monetary and Cur-
rency Fields Expansion
Human Resources: compensa-
tion, benefits, and deduc-
tions.
All the preparation tasks for the
upgrade have been completed
internally by UITS team. The UITS
team has prepared the servers,
installed the required software
and migrated the data from the
old system to the new system.
The UITS team has spent more
than 2000 hours in building test
and production environments
with a total cost saving of more
than 450,000 AED.
The Banner upgrade has been
completed by a team of more
than 80 staff from UITS and func-
tional units. The testing process
of the new product was conduct-
ed prior to the upgrade and took
approximately 3 months to com-
plete. Rigorous testing of all criti-
cal university business processes
has ensured that the system up-
grade was completed successful-
ly.
From version 7 to 8
ERP System Upgrade
“ The UITS team has saved total cost of
more than 450,000 AED for building test
and production environments �?
Author: Fadi Anani
UITS News