TechLahore

Actually this is part of a larger initiative funded by HEC to implement this solution not only in DUHS but actually all over Public Universities in Pakistan.
It is an amazing solution that is being deployed at various universities in record time by Techlogix, Pakistan (Pvt) Ltd.

Well agreed! I have also used it in my higher education program and it indeed is extremely powerful. But what puzzles me is why is HEC spending 45M (I hope the cost is for all the universities) on installation of a software system which although is the best in the world is extremely hard to comprehend with. There are a couple of things that one is vary of, 1) If its 45M per university I would opt for a cheaper solution and invest the rest of the cost in impropving the quality of education. There tens if not hundreds of top universities in the world which are far better than Pakistani Universities who do not have such a system. What happened to improving your infrastructure, facilities and environment of the university?
2) Peoplesoft is Oracle, and Oracle Pakistan has an uncanny nack of finalizing big projects. I wouldn’t be surprised if the entire govt shifts on Oracle (if they already haven’t inked it) in the coming years.
3) Record time you say. Well it doesn’t matter how quickly you implement the solution, what matters is that your solution gets used…..properly! More than 70% of large deployments fail because some tech guru or a couple of them wanted to stand out from the rest of the crowd by implementing in record time. Not taking anything from Techlogix though but only time will tell how fruitful this will be and I seriously have my reservations.

IF you think less than $1 Million will cover all universities, you are dreaming my friend.

HEC has taken a lot of initiatives. Something’s got to happen when the education budget doubles in short period of 3-4 years.

Did I even mention the price it should be completed in? *scratches head to jog memory* i don’t think so. Good that the budget is doubling and we have more for education, I’m all up for higher education but I certainly do not favor spending so much on technology especially when you have cheaper solutions available. What about giving a boost to your local IT Industry through having the best practices embedded in custom software something what the PSEB has done with industrial automation. Maybe even techlogix could have built it, I certainly do not doubt their capabilities. What my take on this huge automation bill is that you get a brilliant product which is so powerful that the average user will only use 50% of its functionality simply because the average user isn’t geared towards or lets say is not culturally groomed to be tech savvy at this stage. And the bulk of the money ends up going to Oracle rather than being circulated within the local IT Industry, what a boost that is to the economy.

Dream we all do! But only some keep their heads out of the clouds and in touch with reality.

LUMS at one time did try to develop a student admin system in-house using its own pool of student and IT folks. It fell on its face, after years of trying they finally came to the realization that there is a reason why companies spend millions of dollars on off the shelf ERP software. ERP software is very complex to develop if developed the right way. PeopleSoft’s solution, for example, is highly configurable. More importantly, it allows a smooth upgrade path where your configurations and customizations are not lost during an upgrade. Rs. 45 million seems excessive but with the efficiencies achieved through a properly implemented student admin solution, Dow should be able to recover its cost in 10 years or so. On a different note, I am not so confident about the implementation. Last I heard, Techlogix was scrambling to get some expertise in PeopleSoft implementations as they had absolutely none before they got this project. The number of people at Techlogix who even knew how had ever even installed PeopleSoft without any customization whatsoever was a whopping zero just a few months ago. Not sure how they managed it. I think a significant part of the Rs. 45million implementation has to be the cost of flying the PeopleSoft experts at exorbitant prices from the US, Europe or Australia. Last I heard, none of the top guys were willing to go to Pakistan even for a very high rate, situation must have changed since then.

The government should not have spent this money on non-Pakistani ERP software. Come to think of it, the value of ERP for Dow is not that huge. Checking student scores online can be done in other ways. In fact, virtual university in Lahore has already developed all this software. It even goes so far as to allow full online classes.

It is quite shameful for a company like Techlogix to be reduced to an installation shop. Next they will be installing MS Word for you and me? I thought they wrote software, but maybe now their focus has become installing other people’s stuff.

I seem to have sparked a debate here. Yes LUMS did fall flat on its face after the system had been running for atleast 5 or so years, been there, experienced that but that too because of mismanagement not because it couldn’t be done. This is what happens when the original team developing and deploying the solution is so easily weasled out of the project and things are handed to the MUCH reliable ITSC.

There has always been a tradeoff between build vs buy, it just seems that such a whopping cost recoverable in ten years you say (might be much more) just doesn’y seem right, especially when one can imagine that after ten years this solution will have to be retired and another deployed in its place.

@nologix: well I do not agree. Techlogix was always known as an IT company but over the years one must see where the industry is headed and that is where system integrators and off the shelf solution providers have sprung up. I see Techlogix diversifying their business rather than becoming MS-Word installers and making a name for themselves. Heck if I were in their place I would do the same.

What I still do not agree with is the cost one has to bare for a Peoplesoft solution. Yes developing an ERP is not easy and we think we do not have the expertise but I see this as an opportunity lost by the industrial heads to make a product of their own which would challenge the might of Oracle or SAP (i dare say). They too started some where. It is not about re-inventing the wheel it is about making a differentiated product whose features can be easily leveraged in the developing world.

Saying that installing and configuring an ERP product such as PeopleSoft is like installing MS-Word shows an acute lack of understanding of the ERP space. Just to give you an idea, a PeopleSoft HR solution has thousands of SQL tables with hundreds of thousands of lines of configurable business logic. Installing a HR solution is not just about inserting the CDs into a computer and running through the wizard, the real work is in figuring out how to configure the business processes to best suite your needs. It is this step that determines how much gain in efficiency an organization would achieve by implementing such a solution. If Dow, for example, is able to define using the best-of-breed provided by PeopleSoft and its consultants and then refine them over years, the gains in efficiency would be monumental.

Now coming to the other point. I believe it is very important for Pakistani software industry to be exposed directly and be challenged against the world class software solutions. This is especially true for ERP due to the vast army of consultant services required to implement, support and enhance an ERP solution like PeopleSoft’s. These consultant positions have to be filled up by our local software shops. This will enable significant growth opportunities for these software establishments within and outside Pakistan as ERP consultants are almost always in a short supply. Equally importantly, such an intimate exposure will enable the more visionary of our software houses to build their own solutions that either replace or compliment the existing ERP software and are more suited to an underdeveloped country’s needs.

As per the comment about Techlogix, I mean when was techlogix a product company. They have always been a services company, have done a lot of work with Oracle. It is but a very natural progression for them to move into PeopleSoft implementations.

What I see us missing out on is the software as a service (SAAS) revolution in the industry. SAAS presents a great opportunity for Pakistan. If you want to challenge the likes of SAP and Oracle, you hit them where they are the weakest and that is the SAAS model of delivering applications. The world is moving to SAAS very quickly led by SalesForce and soon by Workday Inc. SAP and Oracle are scrambling to get there, as the giants scramble the little ones have an opportunity to fill the vacuum. It’s easier said than done though. ERP is no Facebook that you can cook up in your drawing room over a cup of tea. The viability of an ERP product is as much in the product itself as it is in ability to sell it as it does *not* sell itself. SAP has a sales force bigger than the size of most of our software companies combined. It is about convincing extremely conservative IT and department heads to throw out their existing solutions for a new one. The best bet is to start with a new but exciting and emerging business model instead of presenting a slightly better mousetrap to the world, SAAS presents that opportunity. It is important to look at how these different companies started. There was a time there was only SAP (and few others but SAP was by far the largest). SAP didn’t think HR was important enough to provide a solution. PeopleSoft seized on that mistake and provided the first client-server HR solution. It swept the HR solutions market all over the US. Once it had the contacts with customers, it used that to move into other areas such as Financials and CRM (CRM through an acquisition of Vantive). The key here is to get your foot in the door so that you get an audience. If you make a customer happy with your niche solution, s/he will be more likely to hear you out on other issues you can solve for them. How you get through the door is by coming up with a unique solution that solves an issue that either the big guys haven’t thought to be profitable or important enough to solve or haven’t identified yet. Remember, it’s most often the former than the latter.

The price tag has been misquoted check out HEC website and u will get all the financial details. It is around 2.5 million USD for 6 universities including giants like Punjab univ

Last time I checked we were still a developing country with 25% people living under the poverty line and most of our young-aged boys and girls have not even seen a university. It’s such a shame that we’re buying software from the most expensive locations abroad. There are many MANY better opensource solutions out there. There good cost effective solutions provided locally as well for workflow management.

What Dow requires is trivial (student portal, access for professors and administration, course registeration, scores etc) and an ERP from PeopleSoft is an overkill.

ERPs have been done to death; but if LUMS couldn’t do it, I guess that puts into question their inhouse IT team. During my time at GIKI, I was the student webmaster (students make, maintain and run the site), we used Moodle for teacher-student interaction (OpenSource), we had Ultimus BPM for course registeration and scores (did not materialize all the way though). Just because s software cost millions of dollars does NOT make it good (case in point: Linux en masse).

The current price-tag might just be the price of the software; then there would be the super-expensive branded hardware required, the recurring yearly license fees, the quarterly maintenance fees, the list goes on. We can sure as hell do a better job here. Instead, we’re using sledge-hammer where we just need a tiny hammer.

it’s unbelievable that the government is paying techlogix to do this project. the inappropriate use of resources is shameful. it should be cancelled right away and the money should be used for something that is actually useful. new low for the software industry.

nash proposes a great set of alternatives that are tried, tested, and free. is smoother student course registration worth millions of rupees? absolutely not.

I think Govt. has taken a good step. No doubts many gentleman write correctly, there are so many persons who are not able to go at university..and our govt. should spend that money to improved education standards….but until unless our students will not see some international standards..how we could we make our position at international market…I know there are so many companies here,,,which claim they are having a better solutions rather than People soft….but all these things are bull shits… everyone knows ..people soft and sap are on of the BEST market player….Still until unless we won’t came to know there standards …how could we compete with them….
I am very happy …Govt spend that money on education rather than weapons, craft, technology which is never used by us… …

[...] Peoplesoft solution has been adopted by several educational institutions in the country, including Dow University in Karachi. It’s pretty obvious that local ERP installs are an increasingly booming business [...]

IBA Karachi has implemented the PEOPLESOFT system at the cost of 200million rupess… Yes, 20 crores people.
And these costs, as Khurram says are well-justified as they have automated almost entire system of operations at IBA
.Stop worrying about 45million, I bet they didn’t even take the whole package, but these softwares are special and HEC is doing a great job for the purpose..