SAP Public Services announced that Miami-Dade County Public Schools (M-DCPS) has selected SAP's flagship enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, SAP ERP. M-DCPS joins an increasing number of school systems investing in modern information technology to better manage their operations and improve public education.

Implementation of the software began in September 2007. The district-wide business transformation project, called BOSS: Business Operating Solutions for Schools, aims to improve administrative processes and to enable the district to reallocate resources to schools and students. As a result, school administrators will have more time to focus on adhering to the highest level of academic standards so that students can become more productive, well-rounded and responsible citizens. With this selection, Miami-Dade becomes the fifth school district in Florida to run SAP solutions, joining the growing number of top K-12 school districts running SAP nationwide.

As the fourth-largest school district in the United States, M-DCPS has 342,000 students, more than 50,000 employees across 850 work locations, and maintains an annual budget of over $6 billion. In today's educational environment, a school system such as M-DCPS needs a current, integrated financial and human resource system in order to improve decision-making and provide accurate and timely data about student academic progress. M-DCPS legacy systems were labor intensive, difficult to navigate, costly to maintain and risk-abundant due to their age, growing obsolescence and the diminishing knowledge-base of IT staff able to work with the old code.

Given the challenges, M-DCPS officials committed to modernizing their IT systems by leveraging SAP ERP to increase transparency and accountability. This helps to ensure that funds are spent to hire more teachers and allow for smaller classes, to update text books, to better maintain buildings and to fund programs such as music, sports and the arts. Additionally, by eliminating isolated pockets of information, M-DCPS can spur collaboration among principals, teachers and administrators to help ensure that activities and resources are aligned to achieve the district's mission of providing the highest quality education to its students.

Using SAP software, M-DCPS will integrate financial, procurement, human resource and payroll business processes, adopting best business practices to ensure efficiency, effectiveness and high ethical operation standards. The new system will allow school administrators to more easily recruit, develop and retain high-performing, diverse and motivated faculty and staff. It will also provide greater employee access to personal information and self-service options for benefits and payroll, allowing staff to spend less time on cumbersome paperwork and more time focused on student achievement. Processes like time and attendance recording or the management of travel expenses, formerly paper-based, will be replaced by electronic workflow and approval processes. Streamlined procurement, budget and asset management capabilities will also help M-DCPS reduce costs and reallocate funds at the classroom level.

"The Miami-Dade County public school system has already been called a model for the state of Florida and can serve as a lighthouse implementation for K-12 institutions across the nation," said Patrick Bakey, president, SAP Public Services, Inc. "A solid education is one of the most valuable tools we can give our youth. SAP already works with five of the top 10 K-12 customers in the United States, and we are proud to now partner with M-DCPS as it strives to enhance student experiences through technological advancement."