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Student Lifecycle Management Scenarios - What are they about and which SAP components are required in order to benefit of them?

When we receive the question "What is SAP's Student Lifecycle Management about?" and try to come up with a short generic, but concrete answer we are pretty challenged. Why? Because you cannot really answer that question without explaining the "big picture" behind it - SAP ERP and SAP NetWeaver - and that SAP Student Lifecycle Management is built on them.

SAP Student Lifecycle Management is an integral part of SAP's Enterprise Core Component (current version ECC 6.0) and it needs to be activated as an industry extension via the switch framework.

Some of the major academic processes that can be handled with it are:

         
  • Management of student bio-demographic data
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  • Admissions and enrollment processing
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  • Course and class registration
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  • Class and exam scheduling
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  • Transfer articulation
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  • Tuition calculation and Student billing
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  • Degree Audit
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  • Grading
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  • Graduation and degree conferment

SAP Student Lifecycle Management is fully integrated to SAP components like SAP Financials and SAP Human Capital Management which are also in the ERP layer. However, these components need to be configured only to an extent as required by the business processes of the institutions' Student Lifecycle Management scenarios.

The benefit this design holds for customers is - besides the fully integrated data - a high reuse of ERP configuration. However, if a customer starts with one component and wants to keep the option open to extend the implementation later, the configuration should take this into consideration. E. g., while setting up the organizational structure for a HCM implementation one should make sure that it reflects the real structure of faculties such that it is possible to build the academic structure on top of it.

 

Leveraging knowhow is another benefit provided by the reuse option of components. While student fee and grant calculation are rather specific features of SAP Student Lifecycle Management, general processes such as dunning, interest calculation or account maintenance can be configured with general knowledge about SAP's FI-CA component.

SAP Student Lifecycle Management Education customers can leverage additional benefits within SAP NetWeaver components as they provide content for a number of business processes, for example:

 

         
  • Enterprise Portal content for Self Services in the area of Grading and Academic Advising
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  • BW extractors that allow reporting on academic processes
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  • Student data distribution via Process Integration (PI)

Thus in addition to the use of the integration platform, additional content is provided which is not available if other technologies are used.

SAP's Netweaver strategy allows also other software providers to offer content for Netweaver and to become certified SAP partners Or they can even become 'Powered by NetWeaver' partners which demonstrates their ability to build composite processes on top of SAP NetWeaver. Read more about these options at www.partnerwithsap.com

Customers and partners have the choice between various options - for example using a specific student housing/accommodation product or deploying a housing scenario on the platform of SAP Real Estate FX within ERP.

SAP Customer Relationship Management makes it possible to extend Student Lifecycle Management in ERP for additional business processes e. g. by recruitment campaigns. The student and prospect records are fully integrated throughout the student lifecycle.

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