Education institution should be a pioneer especially in the field of research and development. And that’s exactly what has been accomplished by Atma Jaya Catholic University of Indonesia (Unika Atma Jaya) in its IT system development. The university that was founded on June 1st, 1960, is the first high education institution that implements IT to support all of its academic administration.

At the end of 2015, the university officially use the ERP EBS developed by Oracle to support all of the campus academic activities. What’s special is that to meet a specific need the Oracle EBS implementation was done on top of VSphere virtual technology, a virtual machine developed by VMWare, Inc.

Unika Atma Jaya accomplishment in implementing Oracle EBS on top of VMware went through a long way. Early in the 90’s, Danny Natalies, IT Head Unika Atma Jaya, says the university had used a client server system.

And in the 2000’s, the technology adopted by the university gets more advanced. Then the web-based application began to be developed and big IT project was rolled along with the 2003-2007 master plan.

In 2007 the university established the UPT Puskom responsible in continuing the development and maintenance the entire system and IT facility at Unika Atma Jaya. Two years after UPT Puskom managed to improve one new system that serve almost the entire administration needs online.

Understanding Local Taste with Oracle EBS

And later in 2009 Unika Atma Jaya started again to consider the next step they want to take for its system development. The university sees that it’s about time to evaluate the system that was developed in 2003.

Danny says that the decision was not to continue the existing system since the platform is no longer up to date. Other factor was the university decided to implement a new system because the developer was not performing.

After a couple of years of research, Unika Atma Jaya decided to implement Oracle EBS. There were many considerations behind the decision, but the main consideration was the system is seen as capable to accommodate all the university needs.

Combining with VMware

When implementing Oracle EBS, Unika Atma Jaya partnered with PT Mitra Integrasi Informatika (MII), a subsidiary of Metrodata Group. The implementation process was quite brief, with only four months period.

The university expects the ERP system is capable to integrate as well as differentiating recorded transactions in accounting ledger. The system availability in different location is also the reason why virtual technology is important.

And with the option to make each site locations as Disaster Recovery Center and a possibility to adopt cloud technology with affordable investment and no downtime was also another aspect.

But the challenge was at the time Unika Atma Jaya had signed a campus agreement to use SQL and VMWare, thus the university require Oracle EBS to run on top of Vmware.

From there, Unika Atma Jaya requires MII as Oracle EBS implementer to recommend the infrastructure and architecture system solution that can run on VMware.

After going through a series of discussion and research, both system managed to be merged and go live since 2016 and is used by Atma Jaya’s foundation, university and hospital.

Oracle best practice

The Oracle EBS system running on top of VMware remains stable today. However, Danny says, some still doubts its reliability and security of a cloud platform. But Danny sees that it is still a normal thing when people respond to a new technology.

There are four modules used by Unika Atma Jaya currently: Finance, Assets, Inventory, dan Procurement. But Unika Atma Jaya haven’t use the payroll module considering that it has three different core: the hospital, foundation and university where each has its uniqueness, HR system, and a very complex and complicated HR classification that is different one another.

Danny says that the Oracle EBS was chosen because is seen capable to accommodate all the administrative process in the next four to five years ahead. “We have received ISO 9001 and we formalized of work process. After the implementation we realize that bureaucracy doesn't need to be so complicated,” says Danny.

“With Oracle, we are more convinced that the experience as a multinational IT solution supplier we get a quality product and after sales service. We can also adopt their best practice developed based on the requirements and years on implementing the system,” says Danny.