Edusmarte

The Times Group The Times Of India daily ePaper - Watch digital ePaper of India from around the world.

Cloud based ERP in Education – Scope, Advantages and Future

The education sector in Asian countries has witnessed a massive growth in terms of the number of institutes and students in the past few decades. The associated policies and procedures related to various educational functions like admission, teaching, interaction and examination have grown manifold and been streamlined. Also, it has been seen that the information technology tools have offered quite promising solutions to enable effective management of these functions.
This trend has induced a growing need in schools and academic institutions to use technology that delivers effective management solutions. Enterprise resource planning (ERP) is one such tool.

Scope of ERP in India

According to the latest report by Gartner, the software as a service or SaaS-based ERP solution is expected to grow at 28% CAGR. Wherein, the public cloud services market in India is growing at 29.8% in 2014 to total USD 550 million.
Spending on SaaS will hit USD 218 million in 2014, growing 30.3% from 2013 through 2014. Gartner predicts that from 2013 through 2017, USD 4 billion will be spent on cloud services in India and SaaS is the largest overall cloud market segment.

Why integration of ERP is justified?

The integration of the ERP system in the educational institutions is completely justified because of the increasing requirement for centralized access to data. The need to optimize resources leading to better scheduling of staff members also leads to the incorporation of the ERP system. Some basic and apparent advantages of the ERP solution are little or no capital investment to get started, very high return on investment, reduction in manpower resources, etc.

Switching to cloud based ERP makes sense

The cloud-based ERP systems are now taking over the traditional methods of managing data and processes because of its various advantages such as:
- provide enhanced data storage capacity, security and control.
- give a real-time access from anywhere and helps in quick, yet well-informed decision making.
- reduce upfront investments in IT hardware and servers, without worrying about dedicating significant personnel resources to managing it.
- are usually fast and easy to install than on-site deployments. Also, maintenance is much easier
- most importantly, with cloud technology, product enhancements are painless, customisations and integrations automatically update with system upgrades which assure that the business is running with the most advanced capabilities.