This University Boosted Its Appeal To Digital Natives

When Universidad de Talca was founded in 1981, it was designated a regional university by the Chilean government. But after a concerted effort by administrators, the university (located 250 kilometers south of Santiago) has raised its profile and it´s one of the top five Chilean universities.

Hugo Salgado, vice rector of economics and administration, says, “We’ve been focused on improving academic quality and attracting the best professors and students. We have grown tremendously – and quickly.” But administrative systems weren’t keeping up and management realized the University needed to digitize operations.

“We saw ourselves chained by complexity and needed to transform our administration to keep growing,” Salgado says. Processes like procurement and granting student financial aid were complex, and further complicated by the fact that Universidad de Talca is a public school and required to comply with government regulations.

The university’s outdated processes also inhibited its appeal to new students and faculty. “Our students and younger professors are digital natives. We realized we weren’t addressing the needs of this newer generation. We needed to service them – but also prepare for future generations,” says Salgado.

For Salgado, digital transformation spoke to the university’s mission: “Especially when you’re a university, you want to be innovative and promote innovation. To do this we needed to use the newest technology.”

The university administration chose to partner with SAP, the global business software provider. Universidad de Talca uses SAP S/4HANA, the company’s flagship ERP suite, and SAP Analytics Cloud. Additionally, SAP Ariba has digitized procurement and SAP SuccessFactors drives collaborative human resources processes for the university.

“We needed a company with a clear vision that is investing in the future. We chose SAP because it can deal with problems today – but also in 10 years,” says Salgado. “The ecosystem made a big difference in our decision. With SAP we were able to join HERUG (the Higher Education and Research Users Group and part of SAP’s American Software Users Group.) It has been a great opportunity not just to buy the software but to join a community and leverage its expertise.”

Managing student benefits, including financial aid, has already been vastly improved using SAP S/4HANA. Salgado explains that previously, students needed to apply for benefits from the government, but often had to wait six months to learn what support they would receive and about the repayment terms.

“It was very hard for them,” says Salgado. “Now they know the next day how much funding they’ve received and what’s in their accounts.” Considering that most of the university’s students rely on help from the government (Salgado estimates about 80-90 percent), that’s a significant advantage for students and a differentiator for the university.

Moving forward, the university plans to create a student lifecycle system with SAP solutions that will help administer everything from funding to class scheduling and keep track of academic credits.

SAP has also helped the university optimize its payment and purchasing processes. “Before it took 60 days to pay a bill. It was very bureaucratic and had to go to a number of departments. Now we pay in just 15 days after the vendor submits the bill,” says Salgado.

He attributes this to a newly optimized purchasing process. The University has been able to set up clear processes that ensure all purchases have been approved by management; and that suppliers are permitted to do business with the public sector (meaning they have been vetted by, and registered with, the government.)

Salgado notes that the new purchasing process was a huge cultural change for the organization. Before people would buy goods and services as they needed them, and bill central administration afterwards. But now Salgado says, “They have processes to follow. They need to make a request, get budget authorization, work with approved vendors – and make sure they receive all the authorizations they need before making the purchase.”

Initially people resisted the new system as unnecessarily bureaucratic, but now staff and faculty recognize that it ensures compliance and simplifies bill payment and reimbursement (if they pay out of their own pockets.) Salgado says, “Now they see that it makes things easier and less error prone so they spend less time on bureaucracy and more on research.”

The administration has benefited also: it can more easily provide reports to the government that show how public funding has been spent and demonstrate compliance with state-approved vendor policies.

Going forward, Salgado believes that technology will jump start modernization for Latin American universities, ensuring parity with higher education institutions in the United States and Europe.

“We’ve started to realize that universities, while based on traditions, can’t live in the past or we won’t be able to give the students what they need,” he says. “Universities need to go digital and get ready for what our students need today. We either do it, or we become museums.”